There’s a new book out that depicts Irish people as gurning ginger-haired imbeciles who do Irish jigs in the garden and eat bacon and cabbage every day. Who produced this offensive tome? Must have been some Neanderthal bigots, right, who wish it was still the 1970s and still acceptable to Paddy-bash? Actually, it was a leading Irish publisher of school textbooks, and the book in question was intended for Irish schoolkids.
Irish schoolkids were agog at the blatant Mickphobia in their textbooks
Across the Irish Sea there’s a media storm about a textbook produced by the Educational Company of Ireland. It’s a study aid in Social, Personal and Health classes for secondary-school pupils. And it contains a section titled ‘All Different, All Equal’ that unfavourably contrasts a family of cabbage-gobbling Micks in Aran sweaters to a far more fun and enlightened mixed-race family who eat ‘curry, pizza and Asian food’.
It’s an extraordinary sight. There’s a cartoon drawing of a ‘traditional Irish family’ that features a mum, a dad and two kids. All have wild and fraying ginger hair. The kids are Irish dancing. Dad leans on a pitchfork. There’s a hurling stick by the front door. They smile maniacally, as befits this peculiar red-haired race that inhabits the wilds and bogs of the Emerald Isle.
Then there’s a cartoon of a mixed-raced family. They’re in Rome, so you instantly know they’re more cosmopolitan than the carrot-top brood. Dad is black, mum is white. Their mixed kids look super-cool: they’re scoffing pizza and wearing Parisian-style berets. (Oops: cultural appropriation.)
The poor pupils made to read this mad book are informed that the traditional Irish family ‘eat potatoes, bacon and cabbage every day’, ‘do not like change or difference’, and the children get ‘told off’ if they ‘mix with people with a different religion from ours’. The mixed-race family, meanwhile, ‘love change and difference’, ‘eat curry, pizza and Asian food’ and travel around the world. They even visit art galleries.
Shorter version: traditional white Irish family, bad; socially aware mixed-race family, good. Not surprisingly, some of Ireland’s schoolkids were agog at the blatant Mickphobia in their textbooks. They ran home to tell their parents. After dancing a reel and downing a hearty bowl of spuds, no doubt.
A storm ensued. ‘Uproar over “disturbing” schoolbook portrayal of Irish family’, said the front page of the Irish Daily Mail. Irish politicians are demanding to know ‘how this content was approved’ for schools. Now the book’s publishers have promised to withdraw the offending content. All we wanted to do, they pleaded, is ‘help students understand the importance of diversity in our lives’.
How did this happen? How did such a vile stereotype of the Irish as jigging potato-eaters who fear ‘outsiders’ come to be drawn, approved, published and distributed in schools? It used to be stuffy posh Brits who looked upon the Irish as a country-dwelling strange people up to their necks in spuds. Now it seems some in Ireland’s own elite, certainly in educational circles, take such a dim, haughty view of those bog-trotters who live far from Dublin.
This really is a tale for our times. That the publishers thought they were raising awareness about ‘diversity’ is so telling. It confirms that that buzzword is often used by the chattering classes to express their own contempt for the more ‘traditional’ sections of society. ‘Celebrating diversity’ is sometimes little more than a moral cover, a thin linguistic veil, for condemning the old-fashioned majority and their backward ways and unhealthy habits.
This the irony of the cult of diversity – it is presented as a virtuous crackdown on prejudice, but it often boils and seethes with prejudices of its own. Talk to any of Britain’s well-heeled cheerleaders of ‘diversity’ for long enough and I guarantee you’ll hear them tut-tut over the ‘gammon’ and their witless tabloid beliefs. The ideology of ‘diversity’ feels like the means through which the new rulers of society launder their own bigotries and turn them into political correctness.
We end up in the surreal situation where actual anti-Irish stereotypes can be rehabilitated in the name of ‘diversity’. Where the old horrible vision of the Irish as a stuck, simple people, living off spuds and dogma, is given a bit of PC spit and polish and used to warn people of the dangers of the ‘traditional’ way of life. Well, this Mick hates the caricaturing of his countrymen whoever’s doing it, whether it’s imperious Britons or posh Dubliners. Knock it off.
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