TV campaign to aid tolerance

Young children across Ireland are being encouraged to respect each other's differences in a groundbreaking early years initiative.

The Media Initiative for Children has been developed jointly by NIPPA - The Early Years Organisation and the Peace Initiatives Institute (PII), based in Colorado in the United States, over the past two years. It aims to combine television advertisements with interaction in pre-schools to help children aged three to five to have a greater understanding of their physical, racial and cultural differences.

PII has supplied £100,000 of funding for the initiative, while NIPPA has received grants from the George Mitchell Foundation and the Community Foundation in Northern Ireland.

The first of three 60-second television advertisements was broadcast for the first time last week in Northern Ireland on UTV and Channel 4, and on RTE in the Republic of Ireland. A pilot programme involving children in ten pre-schools in Northern Ireland is also running alongside the advertisements.

The advertisements are called 'Tom helps out', 'Kim joins in' and 'Playing the same game'. They feature four animated characters - Tom, who wears glasses and has a patch over his right eye, Kim, a Chinese girl, Jenny and Jim - playing in a park and highlight physical, racial, and cultural and sectarian issues.

NIPPA chief executive Siobhan Fitzpatrick said, 'This pilot programme is using a new approach to provide opportunities for discussion around the basic feelings - happy, sad, frightened and angry. The programme supports directly Section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act and Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which recognises the rights of the child to grow up in an environment of understanding, dignity, freedom, peace and equality.'

She added, 'The ten pre-schools taking part in the pilot have been chosen to reflect the diversity in Northern Ireland, from inner city and rural to urban conflict areas.' Ms Fitzpatrick said the initiative gave young children 'an opportunity to openly discuss and acknowledge the feelings associated with the similarities and differences between themselves and others'.

Paul Harris, PII executive director, said, 'We hope this programme will help more young children within Northern Ireland to understand what it feels like to be excluded and to be more willing to include others who are different from themselves.'

The initiative has evolved from research carried out in 2002 by Dr Paul Connolly of the University of Ulster into the cultural and political awareness of children aged three to six in Northern Ireland.

NIPPA hopes to be able to repeat the initiative later this year in pre-schools across Northern Ireland and to see it used in Scotland and other parts of the UK.