If you haven’t yet read Niamh’s excoriating piece from Saturday on the new SPHE schoolbook which compares two families – Family A and Family B – then I strongly encourage you to do so. She raises many important points about the contents of that book which won’t be repeated in this piece.
While Niamh delved, in great detail, into the “what” of what’s in the books, I think it’s just as important to ask about the “why”.
The image above depicts the sporting mascot of the football team of the University of Notre Dame, also known to their legions of fans as “the fighting Irish”. It depicts what some may feel is a dated vision of Irishness – a leprechaun ready for a good scrap, likely over nothing and likely fuelled by the excessive consumption of alcohol. In recent years there have been various campaigns, almost all from the kinds of people who’ve never watched a game of College Football in their lives, to get Notre Dame to change their “offensive” mascot.
I was thinking about this, reading the description of “Family A” in the textbook Niamh wrote about on Saturday.
What comes through in the description of “family A” in the book in question is a deep sense of loathing of a particular image of Irishness: They are spud-eating, thatched-cottage-dwelling, crossroads dancing, red-haired celtic mountainy men, and they likely say “schpud” instead of spud. You’ll find such a family in only two places: This book, and the kind of American Movie about Ireland where Tom Cruise does an accent that makes you want to reach for the pitchforks.
This is a portrait of an Irish family that tells us how the authors see the worst of their own country – a backward land fit only for American tourists to visit and marvel at the simplicity of life in the old sod. By contrast family B tells us what the authors would like Ireland to be: Culturally, ethnically, and gastronomically diverse, with the thatched cottages and bacon and cabbage and dancing at the crossroads all cast safely, with O’Leary, in the grave.
The thing that strikes me about all of this is how Irish nationalism has been almost entirely inverted by many of those in positions of power and influence in our society. Nationalism, traditionally, is about taking pride (to a sometimes-irrational extent, it must be said) in a country’s history, culture, traditions, and people. That’s been inverted in Ireland, where progressivism now largely takes pride in the washing away of the country’s history, culture, traditions, and, increasingly, its people.
The Irish establishment has long held a deep insecurity about itself and the country and how it is seen by the world. How this manifests itself is varied, but consistent: From the traditional “would you please say something nice about Ireland?” question to any foreign guest of significance on the Late Late Show, to the almost psychotic insistence that Ireland is “at the heart of Europe” when it remains a peripheral nation in the EU. It also manifests itself, these days, in the fact that the Pride and Progress flags for LGBT rights fly with as much or greater frequency than the tricolour does in many of our towns and cities. Many of our people seem constantly in need of the psychological crutch of being reminded that Ireland has changed.
One of the big reasons for this, I think, is that despite all the best efforts of politicians, journalists, authors, and cultural figures to show the world that Ireland has changed, the world refuses to much notice, or care. Go to Texas or Louisiana or Perth and attend a Saint Patrick’s Day parade, and you’ll see very little evidence of a change in how this country is presented internationally by those who think of us fondly. It’s still Cailini dancing a reel, people drinking Guinness, and misty-eyed Americans dreaming of the IRA finally reclaiming the fourth green field. Indeed, those responsible for marketing the country internationally still lean into all that guff consistently, hence the “Irish traffic jam” postcards that you still find on sale for Americans to send home to maw and paw.
Imagine, for a moment, how it might feel to have done all that work to try and turn your country into the next San Francisco, only to find that people from San Francisco still think of you as a land of comically drunken leprechaun sheepherders. And worse, that they think of you that way with fondness.
If you begin to understand Irish progressivism as first and foremost a sense of mortification and embarrassment on the global stage, then stuff like the depiction of “family A” in a schoolbook starts to become more comprehensible. There is not one Irish family – not one – that actually behaves like the one depicted. But the purpose of the depiction in the book is to make sure that every Irish student who comes through the system emerges with the same feeling of obsessive loathing of a particular image of Ireland that so many of our betters share amongst themselves.
There is a reason, after all, that so many Government departments use the pride and progress flags, and not the Irish flag, to garnish their email footers and official literature. There is a reason that “diversity” (in everything but thought) is the highest national political value, having quietly replaced “equality” in recent years. There is a reason that fictional “Family B” enjoys Asian food and has Dutch heritage. All of it is geared towards the same ultimate goal: Proving to the world (which doesn’t care) that Ireland has moved beyond Aran sweaters and thatched cottages. It is a scream for approval from people who still, stubbornly, like to think of us as sheepherders and turfcutters and fans of Daniel O’Donnell.
The book isn’t comparing and contrasting two families. It’s comparing and contrasting two Irelands: Family B is who Irish progressives want this nation to be. Family A is how, they fear, the world still sees us anyway.
It’s all a bit tragic.