Romantic Ireland's dead and gone.

Woke Ireland rises like a zombie in its place

The back-to-school season in Ireland has gotten off to a disconcerting start, following the revelation of a textbook lesson designed for 12-13 year old Irish students that featured a highly offensive depiction of a ‘traditional’ Irish family, contrasted unfavourably with a multi-culti, multi-racial, hipster family. The lesson asks students to listen with their eyes closed (weird) as the teacher reads out the differences between Family A (the dodgy Irish one) and Family B (the cool hipster one) and — asks them which one they’d prefer to be a part of.

Family A, the book patiently explains, “do not like difference. All of our family members are Irish. We do not have a single relation living abroad, or anyone from another country in our family. We have a family business and it is expected that we will join it when we finish school. Noirín would like to be a yoga instructor but my dad says it is not a proper job and she must stick to what she knows. We eat Irish food and have potatoes, bacon and cabbage every day because it is Irish and it is our tradition. Our holidays are spent touring Ireland. We all play Irish musical instruments and go the Fleadh every summer. Sean wanted to learn the drums and steel guitar but mam said no because there are lots of great Irish instruments. We love sport but we must only play hurling, handball or Gaelic football. No foreign sports are permitted. It is okay for us to watch television programmes that are made in Ireland …but our parents complain that RTE is showing more and more ‘imported trash’ every day. The only movies we get to see are Irish ones, none of that Hollywood rubbish for us. We get told off if we mix with people of a different religion from ours as they would be a bad influence on us.”

It is impossible for me to overstate how wrong-headed and unfitting this description of a ‘typical' Irish family is— it would simply give too much credence to what is obviously a ham-fisted, childish paragraph written by someone with painfully limited intellectual capacity. 

But allow me to correct a few of the more glaring inaccuracies. There is hardly a family on this island — north or south — that does not have a family member living oversees currently, as well as branches of family members living abroad over generations. This is a well-known historical fact. Irish people are perhaps the most famous immigrants in the whole damn world. They are also intrepid travellers. Working class and rural families all travel to places like Spain for their holidays. Young people backpack across Europe. Every *single* Irish person I went to university with travelled extensively throughout the world. The Irish are famously popular in tourist spots on every continent. This idea of an Irish family that never leaves the island is pure fantasy. Nobody could stand this weather for that long. 

And I take personal offence on behalf of all ‘real’ Irish people that anyone here would ever, in 2024 reprimand children for “mixing with people from a different religion.” I am flabbergasted that someone could put that in a school textbook claiming to portray contemporary Irish society, which is peaceable and secular. 

They eat potatoes! Quel horreur! Never mind that every tiny Irish town has a Chinese takeaway and/or pizzeria, and every supermarket has food from every corner of the earth, thanks to this little-noticed phenomenon called global supply chains. 

It is important to note the distinct overtones of de-Kulakization present in this text. They own  a family business — suspect! The horrible family patriarch rejects his daughter’s wish to be a yoga teacher (I mean, REALLY?) because he’s a bigot. The close, economically successful, singular-minded family unit must be destroyed if the totalitarian project is to succeed. 

Family B, on the other hand — now, that’s a horse of different colour! 

“We love change and difference. We find other cultures new and exciting. Our favourite dinners are curry, pizza and Asian food. During school holidays we go camping in Europe and visit the galleries….My eldest brother Flor… is now a volunteer with the Red Cross in Syria.”

What?

The textbook this was found in is part of the Social, Personal and Health Education curriculum, which is clearly where the state is hiding all of its ideological brainwashing elements. It sounds suspiciously like Social Emotional Learning in the US curriculum. SPHE, apparently, helps students to “build positive self-worth,” “maintain respectful and loving relationships with self and others,” and “contribute positively to society.” Learning to critique Irish families was part of the programme for 12-13 year olds, but a draft version of the SPHE curriculum for older teens also had “controversial references” to “white Irish privilege” — which, as gript.ie reported yesterday, have been removed.  

I would categorise this overall as a massive fail for the creepy progressive authoritarians. But it is crucial to see this incident as part of a much larger whole. All of Europe is currently under assault by unelected policymakers who want to police what we say, control who we listen to, and micromanage what we believe. They are literally trying to remake indigenous cultures because attachment to those cultures is a bulwark against their woke-washing. 

This is done on multiple fronts, and the main vector for the woke-washing are the non-governmental organisations, which the Irish government funds to the tune of €5 billion a year — or 8 percent of the Irish budget. 

As fellow Substacker Conor Fitzgerald reported in UnHerd in 2022:

“No immigration-restrictionist, free-speech or gender-critical NGOs are recipients of an ounce of government largesse: the money all goes on the other side of the scale. The large number of Catholic or Catholic-aligned organisations funded by the state are either silent on these issues or actively on the progressive side.

Nowadays, NGOs are simply too powerful, too useful and too deeply embedded in the decision-making process to be removed.”

Every EU country is littered with similar organisations, living high off the EU hog, and I would wager that they financially support a decent proportion of young professional managerial types who cannot find work outside the government cartels. These are the same young professional managerial types who spend their weekends protesting all the ‘just causes,’ in between DJ sets in craft beer gardens. 

The textbook that seeks to portray Irish families as backward isolationists were made by Edco, a private company that apparently has been making educational books for Irish children since 1910. How have they allowed such a travesty? I would love some intrepid journalist to find out, but i would not be in the slightest bit surprised if it was a young ideologue fresh off some kind of EU training course offering ‘toolkits’ on making education ‘inclusive,’ ‘diverse’, and ‘democratic.’

There is something magical about Irishness, which for all its tired cliches is actually very real and present and living in the places and the people. There is much to criticise here, sure.  And don’t get me wrong, as fiercely as I’m defending the place right now, if I suddenly came upon millions of pounds, I would immediately leave. But it is utterly, utterly unique and authentic a place. Irish identity is prized and beloved throughout the world. Therefore, under the woke colonial agenda, it is imperative that it be at the very least pasteurised- if not destroyed.

I have written about the woke takeover of Ireland here and here. And the sorry economic and cultural state of the tiny island nation here. 

So it doesn’t surprise me that this textbook exists. But it is a salutary lesson in the perils of embracing woke. It will never be enough. It doesn’t matter how much you march in support of Palestine. It does’t matter how much you love the gays, or Ukraine, or how much you wring your hands over climate change. The woke ideologues will keep demanding more of you until there is nothing left — only dusty husks of a once-great culture.