This paper discusses personal and current ethnographic research into European Union funded community education programmes aimed at strengthening the peace process in Northern Ireland and the border counties of the Republic of Ireland. The ethnography aims to evaluate educational programmes from the perspective of participants, and involves contact on both sides of the Irish border with loyalist and republican ex-prisoners; those bereaved and injured as a result of political violence; members of state security forces, educators and, my reflexive self. Topics discussed include the use of ex-prisoners and those bereaved or injured as key 'informants', an unfortunate word in a Northern Irish context, where informants are more usually known as persons supplying information to the security forces, hence my creation of the term 'key advisors' or research participants, terms used in Socratic and Vygotskian senses to support the notion that learning comes through interaction with others. Included in the discussion is my choice of key advisors, a choice that is anti-exclusive rather than inclusive, and a recruitment process that 'deliberately creates opportunities for opportunity sampling', such sampling making use of Socratic dialogue and semi-structured interviews, the dialogue sometimes taking place in the early hours of the morning during drinking sessions, such dialogue being used as an educational tool to aimed at 'intensifying the conflict' in order to produce conflict transformation.Discovery of the reflexive self as my main informant is a core theme of the paper produces a post-modernist leaning, allowing freedom for a self that develops in the iterative atmosphere of a society where two very different ontological positions exist, myself subscribing to neither position, as well as to both, deconstructing then reconstructing experiences; and a self that colludes with Freireian notions of dialogics and conscientization, as well as with a Kantian philosophical understanding of education. This developing self will be used to argue that interpretivistic educational research has no true start or end point, a reflexive ethnography being a lifelong endeavor based on a personal habitus built on the past, and an end point that may be concretized in text, but forever malleable in unpublished form. Dangers imposed by semiotic misinterpretation in the field are an integral part of the paper, these dangers being of an academic, physical and emotional type; symbols and names playing hugely important roles in Northern Irish culture and society. Also discussed is a theory that the European Union's quantitative evaluation of the educational programmes discussed is a barrier to a more effective and sustainable forms of learning and conflict transformation.