This paper explores the issue of peace education in Northern Ireland in its broadest sense. It looks not merely at peace education per se but also at the sectarian context of schooling and at a variety of anti-sectarian initiatives. In recent years there have been several peace education ventures in Northern Ireland reflecting the statutory responsibility of the education and training agencies in the promotion of peace. These efforts have occurred at a variety of levels (none of them mutually exclusive from one another) but the principal venues have been the schools, youth and community agencies, and the higher education and adult education sectors. The schemes pioneered by these diverse organizations have ranged from holiday projects involving groups of Catholic and Protestant children to programs of study on Northern Ireland history and politics to various types of cross-community contact schemes in a variety of institutional and non-institutional settings. A relatively new feature on the scene is the work of the Community Relations Council (CRC) which has programs in the areas of reconciliation and community skills training. The CRC was established in January 1990 as an independent organization (with substantial government funding) and charged with the task of promoting better community relations and the recognition of cultural diversity. In recent years the Department of Education in Northern Ireland has developed the notion of Education for Mutual Understanding as a basic strategy of encouraging appreciation of a divided heritage and community. The possibilities as well as the problems of implementation of many of these ideas are the subject of this paper. (Contains 36 references.) (Author)