“An Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman walk into a pub…” or so the joke goes. If you’re old enough to remember this staple gag of English standup, you’ll know that it got its laughs from the Irishman doing or saying something hilariously silly. Such condescension towards Irish people as charming fools is certainly no longer à la mode on today’s comedy circuit.
But here’s the irony: it’s an Irish publishing company that has just perpetrated a damning caricature of white Irish people in the name of education. The book was one of the Educational Company of Ireland’s ‘Junior Cycle’ curriculum texts for the teaching of social, personal and health education in secondary schools.
It was a section in the book called ‘All Different, All Equal’ that caused a furore fiercer than a West Coast stoirm. At the start of the chapter is a cartoon of a white Irish family presented as gurning bumpkins. The kids are doing a jig, and dad is about to get stuck into some farm work with only a pitchfork to hand. There’s a hurling stick leaning against the door and chickens and cows wander gormlessly about the farmhouse and across the fields. The most disturbing feature is the people’s vacantly staring eyes. It’s a simple idyll fit for simpletons.
The chapter then proceeds to teach that the traditional Irish family eats a daily diet of potatoes, bacon and cabbage and doesn’t like change or difference. Parents prohibit their children from mixing with people with a different religion. What are Irish school-kids meant to learn? That the white Irish working class, though they have quaint traditions, are backward, boring and prejudiced. Who knew?
To ram the point home, the chapter contrasts the ginger-knobbed rubes unfavourably with a cartoon of an ‘enlightened’ mixed race family. Their life is breezily wonderful and sophisticated. First, they are pictured in the cultural capital of Rome, so you know they are cosmopolitan rather than stuck in the bogs. Dad’s black, mum’s white. The daughter’s wolfing pizza and wearing a French beret. They’re technologically savvy as they’re taking a selfie. They’re described as loving change, difference and fine art.
It’s to the credit of some Irish politicians, many people and the school children who were the first to complain that they weren’t going to let these insults go. (Perhaps some mixed race Irish families were put out too by being stereotyped and used as part of this mockery.) As a consequence, the book’s publishers have promised to withdraw the offending content. Their excuse for publishing it in the first place? It was to help students understand the importance of diversity in their lives.
But here lies the problem. Diversity can and should be taught in ways that honour everyone. The book could’ve provided photographs of real Irish people of all skin colours and ways of life showing them going about their everyday business, without any suggestion that one legal way of life is better than another. The pupils could then be challenged to think about what unites all these people as being Irish. At the heart of cultural and ethnic diversity must be a unifying centre. However, what diversity really means is that among the differences between people there’s a hierarchy: at the top are mixed race families who are to be admired and at the bottom are white families who are to be despised. Diversity education is therefore an exercise in accepting the cultural elite’s contempt for the majority who like continuity, and are sceptical of the elite’s pet project of mass immigration. In attempting to challenge prejudice against mixed race families, the publishers have ironically propagated their own.
But here in England we’ve the same thing. Our hawkers of diversity have meltdowns over the white working class whom they dismiss as ‘gammons’, little Englanders, and far-right wingnuts. English people of black and Asian heritages are labelled ‘coconuts’ if they dare to work alongside white people and be successful rather than wallow in a mentality of victimhood and segregation. Even the term Anglo-Saxon has been cancelled by academics as racist.
Is it not time that all English politicians and people of whatever party, colour and class followed the Irish’s example and denounced diversity politics for what it is: a poison that has spread insidiously through the body politic and is making our culture terminally sick with division?
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
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But…Mr Harris,
But…Mr. Harris, that’s the basis of “their” plan. Divide and conquer.
Divide, conquer and subjugate. You wouldn’t catch the publisher ‘withdrawing the offending content’ in this country.
Thanks for your comment. I agree that for some the plan is division. I wrote the article for those who sincerely believe that diversity politics is really about creating happy societies when in fact the opposite happens.