Enniskillen actor Adrian Dunbar has hit out at Northern Ireland’s politicians whom he believes have a “huge resistance” to integrated education in the province.

The Line of Duty and Broken star co-hosted a summer drinks reception for the Integrated Education Fund in Kensington, London last week.

Mr. Dunbar and media executive David Montgomery held the event to celebrate the Integrated Education Fund’s 25th anniversary and to highlight the relevance of integrated education in Northern Ireland. 

The 60 guests included business people, personalities, politicians and former integrated alumni.

Addressing the gathering, Mr. Dunbar said they were “united by a motivation to put something back into the society we grew up in.”

He stated: “I always wondered how come we spend millions and millions of pounds separating children at the age of five to then spend millions trying to tell them that they were the same at the age of 16.

“There are thousands of organisations that are funded to try to bring children together when actually all that money could be going into an integrated education system.”

He criticised politicians who are ‘resistant’ to integrated education adding: “If we want to heal society in Northern Ireland then integrated education would be the norm, sadly it’s not. There’s huge resistance to it from various parties and the people who are advocating a two-strand education system have a vested interest in the state of Northern Ireland being split.”

Speaking to the Sunday Life at the weekend, he added: “The 1970s here saw the biggest mass refugee exodus since the Second World War, simply because organisations were able to make people feel fearful enough of their neighbours to move. I ask myself why and how could that happen? How could people not know the person next door well enough to know they wouldn’t do them damage? I put that down to being separated from the age of five.”

He stated: “We have to tell people they are the same and we can’t do that with a two-strand education system.”

Integrated Education first came to Fermanagh in the shape of Enniskillen Integrated Primary School which was created after the Enniskillen Bomb in 1987. 

READ: Integrated PS celebrates 25 years

The school’s founders were members of Enniskillen Together, a cross-community group determined that reconciliation should be the way forward after the atrocity. They included John Maxwell, who saw a new integrated school as a fitting tribute to his son Paul, who had died alongside Lord Mountbatten when the IRA bombed his fishing boat at Mullaghmore in 1979.

Fellow Northern Irish actor Liam Neeson is also a fervent supporter of integrated education in Northern Ireland.