Did you know that if you love GAA, and have a family business, and play Irish music, and holiday in Ireland, might be critical of RTÉ, and support Irish filmmaking – and maybe keep hens, and think potatoes are tasty – you are Family A in a SPHE handbook being used in Irish schools since 2023? And it’s very obvious that Family A are not just inferior to diverse families, but they are probably bigoted, insular, and small-minded too.
The chapter in the SPHE book – ironically entitled “All different, All equal” – was brought to the attention of Carol Nolan TD this week by a furious parent who said her 12-year old son had come home with it from school, having started first year this week.
At first glance, it’s actually laughable, being so wildly clichéd and asinine as to almost be beyond offensive, and, in fact, many people sharing it online yesterday thought it was a parody. But actually, there’s nothing funny about it.
Two families are compared in this exercise. If you are more like Family A, you are not diverse, and that is your terrible failing – because failure to achieve that holy grail essential for modern virtue-signalling means that, despite the supposed emphasis on equality, you are definitely and absolutely a lesser family, and you can be subjected to lazy, offensive, stereotyping – not just online or in the media – but in the classroom.
You are narrow-minded, gastronomically illiterate, hicks. You hate people who don’t share the same religion, and even your cattle look slightly stupid probably because they are a reflection on their owners.
You eat bacon and cabbage every SINGLE day because you hate variety and are therefore deprived of good taste or even taste buds or shops or something, or because you are too dim-witted to discover other meats – even though you keep hens – not to mind pasta, and really exotic stuff like spinach, or maybe frozen veg.
You like the Fleadh Cheoil and attend every year, which obviously means you hate all other music, not because – in common with vast swathes of the country – you love your ancient, beautiful culture, but because you are afraid of diversity. You are not inclusive or open-minded enough to see that anything and everything is preferable to what is uniquely Irish. But you are also a control freak, so you won’t let your kids listen to anything else or watch Hollywood movies.
If your children are unfortunate enough to be in the classroom when this passive-aggressive bullshit is being read aloud (as ordered by this absurd, pathetic, vile schoolbook) they have to close their eyes and listen while Family A is being described, presumably with the right mixture of condescension and contempt, by their teacher. They have to “close their eyes and imagine what it would be like to live in this family”, with the obvious subtext of “imagine the horror”.
Most people reading the page from the SPHE handbook yesterday couldn’t believe this garbage could be real, and is actually included in a schoolbook that they’ve paid for. Your taxes also pay for it to be read aloud in the classroom that you’ve entrusted your kids too – so that your kids, who maybe like GAA and maybe play trad, and God forbid, maybe speak Irish too – are being sneered at while the entire classroom can join in a critique of how awful your family is.
Now, obviously Family A don’t really fully exist, because there almost isn’t a person in Ireland (the country with brutal emigration rates due to ferocious colonialism and indifferent governance) who doesn’t have relatives abroad, or who doesn’t eat pizza, or who wouldn’t enjoy seeing a bit of the world, but, of course, not every item in this sneering description needs to apply. If “all your family members are Irish”, and maybe you like Irish dancing and pay hurling, this gist is that this is your family, because this is how labels and stereotypes and caricatures are applied, something you’d think the authors of a SPHE handbook would know. Maybe they do, and they wrote this garbage anyway.
Look at the words being used, by the way, and imagine your child in the classroom being made to feel that because they are proud of their Irish heritage, and because their parents committed the cardinal sin of marrying another Irish person, their family is being lampooned in this exercise. “No foreign games are permitted.” “We get told off if we mix with people with a different religion”. “Our parents complain” ete etc. Nasty, small-minded bigoted parents, who won’t let daughter do yoga or son play drums because they hate foreign things, and by implication foreign people too.
Also imagine, if you will, what the reaction would be if this was written about an Indian family. “They eat curry every day. They only like other Indians. They won’t let us talk to Catholics. They only let us watch Bollywood. We can only play the sitar.” There’d be an immediate uproar, and a Late Late national examination of conscience, followed by Fintan O’Toole articles about how we needed to atone for our wrongdoings by wearing S&M gear and ashes and taking out a subscription to the Irish Times.
The exercise continues in the SPHE handbook as the kids are asked the following questions, because its a good and healthy thing now apparently to ask the whole class to critique someone’s family:
Then we come to Family B, who are obviously preferable in every way, because they are diverse, and therefore marvellous. Not for them the stone-age mindset of favouring GAA or learning slow airs. Look, they have smartphones and pizzas and funky square glasses are obviously super-mad-craic and lovely and gorgeous and kind and open-minded and we haven’t a bad word to say about them.
They “love change and difference” and support their kids in whatever life-path they choose, unlike rotten Family A who are forcing their poor children to slave away in the mouldy old family business – but hey, why would the families who take great pride in being the second or third or fourth generation to be productive members of society passing on an essential trade and providing employment, be offended? (Irish people aren’t allowed to be offended anyway, we’re too far down the misery and exploitation hierarchy despite 800 years of living under the lash of arid censure, to quote Donagh McDonagh). I suppose the bad parents of Family A might be deterring their offspring from being influencers or something really, really important.
Did you spot, by the way, the bland racial stereotyping in “we like … Asian food”. What’s that now? Malaysian? Thai? Indonesian? Or just anything with rice? Now, like most people, I generally think, good luck to Family B if all that diversity floats their boat. But that’s not what’s really being conveyed here. There’s the non-too-subtle inclusion of the indications of kindness and community spirit (volunteering, fund-raising, helping others) in Family B’s description that are so obviously missing from nasty, small-minded, insular Irish Family A.
We Irish are so awful, of course. Despite being the most generous people in the world, we’re obviously too busy being controlling and intolerant to do anything civic-minded – and we hate skiing and art and meeting people, and experiencing cultures, and having a good time. This bilge was signed off as acceptable for inclusion as an exercise in a schoolbook, which, regardless of the author’s intent, presents Irish culture using the kind of drivel you might have expected in a 1880’s edition of Punch.
Don’t even get me started on the glaringly obvious denigration of one’s own traditions in preference of what exactly: mass-produced dirges produced by global corporations fleecing indulgent parents dry? Down with the Fleadh, hon Taylor Swift squeezing the last penny from you – though lots of families, of course, like both ‘We Are Never, Ever’ and The Concertina Reel equally, and good luck to them too, because this division exists mostly only the minds of the writers of this kind of idiotic nonsense anyway.
(The authors are Anne Potts and Nodlaig O’Grady, by the way, and the publisher is Edco. Maybe they were trying to be funny, or it was all tongue-in-cheek, though SPHE is usually a pretty humourless subject.)
But this absurd, insidious classroom exercise actually gets worse. The kids are then told, after discussing the advantages and disadvantages of Family B (though there are obviously no disadvantages in the description) that they must decide which family is more inclusive? Gosh, one wonders what answer the kids have been primed to give?
And then we come to the most egregious part of the exercise: “After your class share their answers to the first three questions decide which family you would choose to belong to”.
We’re rating families in the classroom now? Under the pretence of respecting diversity? This is an actually a disgusting exercise in bullying of schoolchildren whose families like being Irish, are proud of being Irish, and who therefore could find themselves targeted in school – an outcome that should be completely and absolutely unacceptable to any parent. Again, imagine if the classroom exercise compared a black family to another family and then asked the kids what family they would choose to belong to? There would be government-funded NGOs rioting on the streets.
The message throughout this exercise, in my opinion, isn’t that we should respect other cultures – it’s that other cultures are superior. Diversity is superior. And we are going to beat that into your kids, not with a strap, but by an assault on their identity and their family life and their sense of pride. Health and wellbeing studies, my arse. (Yes, I don’t usually sink to vulgarities but in this instance, I’ll make an exception.) This whole exercise is flagged as being about inclusion, but instead one family – the Irish family – are presented as controlling bigots.
Of course, the real question is why do the people who are targeted in this hateful, divisive sneering put up with this assault on our culture. The GAA should be up in arms. So should people who make Irish films, and traditional musicians. Grow a spine and stop taking pernicious crap off these morons who are trying to paint you as extremists because you love your own culture and your own sports and, God forbid, might find potatoes in all or any of their iterations tasty. Seriously though, what kind of a debased servile country we have become if we accept this degradation of our own people in our classrooms. As you’d expect, the book goes on, in subsequent chapters, to introduce the usual nonsense about Gingerbread persons, and kids being assigned genders and other scientific rubbish.
Carol Nolan this week said “How this trash and drivel ever made its way into a curriculum text book is almost beyond me. There is a level of contemptuous loathing and underlying aggression to it that is simply jaw-dropping. This farcical nonsense should be removed from every classroom and filed under the ‘where bad ideas go to die’ section of any library that will take it. There are far more appropriate ways to discuss how families choose to nurture their children’s cultural identity that do not involve this cheap and sneering effort”.
She is completely correct. This joke of a schoolbook, in my opinion, should be confined to the bin. And I’d rather be some version of Family A, than seek favour from a shower of morons who don’t even know what a woman is, and wouldn’t know real respect and diversity if it bit them on the posterior.
Anyway, they can go to hell. I’m off to teach a seannós class for kids on zoom, and then I might watch a hurling match, and make a curry for dinner. We’ll decide our own diversity without the lazy, vicious, anti-Irish stereotyping.