All that Mr Justice Colton had to decide regarding the amalgamation of Portora and the Collegiate was whether John O’Dowd had lost the run of himself. Legally speaking, it was none of his business whether the education minister had in fact made the right call, yet it is still obvious from the judgment that he did. 
The cold, hard reality for the Collegiate is that amalgamation was a fait accompli a long time ago. The seed was sown by the publication of Sir George Bain’s report “Schools for the Future” back in 2006, setting the bar at a minimum 600 pupils. The Department of Education refused Portora’s request for a new school build on that basis and met with the Collegiate in April 2007 to begin discussions about amalgamation. In 2009 the Sustainable Schools Policy effectively signed the death warrant of both schools as separate entities, imposing a duty upon their respective boards to deliver minimum levels of curriculum provision. Both Portora and the Collegiate fell short of the requirements at Key Stage Four.
The Collegiate leadership quite legitimately feel they know what’s best for selected girls in Fermanagh, but the government’s remit is wider than that and, if ever, the time to obtain a judicial review was seven years ago. Mr O’Dowd’s decision followed the established policy and Mr Justice Colton had solid grounds to leave it be. 
The 59-page written judgment, however, is a lot more revealing than that. With the exception that the judge thought more enquiry could have been made into the logistics of the temporary split site arrangement, he dismissed the Collegiate’s arguments emphatically. In the Collegiate’s defence, perhaps it was the confined legal territory in which they had to frame their submissions that contributed to the overall case against amalgamation seeming weak and conflicted.
They pointed to the delay in the Devenish school build when that was largely caused by a finance policy that has since been scrapped. They explained at length that Devenish enrolment was perilously low because parents chose to send their children to schools outside Fermanagh, when the most obvious factor in that phenomenon was the earlier-lamented lack of new build. They argued that reducing grammar places would not increase numbers at Devenish in any case, but unsurprisingly failed to convince the judge that enrolment levels either side of a selective see-saw went up and down entirely of their own volition.
They posited that a new school might never be built when the project was already in train and, as the judge said, a failure to come up with the money would be “contrary to all policy decisions made to date”, “nothing short of a scandal” and “a serious breach of faith”. They warned about traffic chaos in the meantime, when it did not necessarily follow that large numbers of pupils would be moving between schools on a daily basis. They decried a potential funding deficit that would only be relevant if existing pupils had to leave, which they don’t. They suggested that there would be less sharing of courses across the sectors through the Fermanagh Learning Community, a “somewhat disingenuous” point given that sharing was very limited in any case, that it was self-evident that a closed school could not collaborate with other schools and that the purpose of amalgamation, i.e. to achieve minimum levels of course provision, effectively cancelled out the need for the FLC.
However the judge reserved most of his criticism for the Collegiate’s mis-characterisation of the Fermanagh Protestant Board of Education, the de facto owner of Portora’s lands and buildings with a minority presence on its board of governors. “To use Mr Scoffield QC’s colourful phrase the FPBE has been presented as some sort of Protestant Taliban intent on exercising a sinister role over the proposed new school.” The judge found that in fact the FPBE has shown leadership and that it is motivated by the best interests of students in the Fermanagh area, holding the school assets exclusively for educational rather than religious benefit. Certainly Old Portorans of a vintage would agree that religion of any sort is a rather pale thread in the rich tapestry of school life there (especially when they recall their music teacher’s tendency to drift into Theme From Superman during assembly).  
The Collegiate’s final roll of the dice in this vein was their argument that the name “Royal” would deter Nationalist or Catholic children from the new school. This may technically be true in some quarters but it is fatally devalued by the reality that Portora currently attracts more than twice the number of Catholics than the Collegiate.
It seems to have been clear to Mr Justice Colton, and to most people viewing at arm’s length, that the fuel behind this dispute is not so much traffic concerns and learning communities and dry legislative frameworks. It is the “huge emotional impact on all those associated with the schools” including past pupils. It is the “strong loyalties which will be resistant to change”. In the case of the Collegiate, it is the perception that this amounts to a ‘takeover’ because Portora has the better site.
Whatever the challenges the next few years bring, the sincere hope of everyone involved must surely be that future generations of girls and boys flourish in those magnificent grounds with a state of the art new school perched atop the hill. Will those children regret the closed chapter of other people’s history? I doubt it.    
*A family member is involved in these issues but these views are my own.