An excavation of the racialised politics of viability underpinning education policy in Ireland

Abstract

This paper unearths the improvisational nature of Irish state exigencies and their central contribution to racialisation in and through schooling. The analysis unravels white-Irishness through gender and Traveller membership, in terms of its links to the state's early efforts at intelligibility and associated politics of desirable and viable subject regulation. It is suggested that mutating theocentric, mercantile and liberal equality paradigms attempt to privilege certain subjects as more viable than others in contemporary Ireland through race, but also class, gender and other vectors of power. Three technologies of potential exclusion through inclusionary state discourses are identified for minority ethnic school subjects. These are language support, pop-anti-racist terminology and the politics of school access and school provision. Ultimately it is argued that supporting ‘integration’ and ‘anti-racism’ in Irish education might require conceptual and political vigilance of the terms of the ‘inclusive state’ at all times.

Keywords:

• education
• anti-racism
• white-Irishness
• language support
• integration
• racialisation
• viability

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge and thank the reviewers and editorial team for their gracious and helpful comments.

Notes

1. The term ‘race’ is used without inverted commas from this point onward.

2. Educate Together are currently the only established multidenominational school provider in Ireland, operating at primary level only. Educate Together were petitioning the government for permission to provide secondary education at the time of writing.

3. A potential privileging of white-Irishness is not considered necessarily intentional, or a unilateral conspiracy (Gillborn 2008; Bryan 2009). Neither are the public statements used above and later in this paper presented as intentional ‘acts’ of exclusion which stand apart from the contexts of their emergence.

4. Meaning ‘true Gael’.

5. Interestingly, as emerging ‘whites’, Irish migrants to America historically did the opposite: placing race and blood at the centre of the debate (jus sanguinis), over and above claims to native territory (jus soli).

6. RTÉ Radio's ‘A piece of cloth’ documentary discusses the case of Shekinah Egan, a Gorey student, positioned at the centre of this debate. Shekinahs mother argues on the programme that while the OMI consulted school principals, the male leaders of mosques in Ireland and ‘less than a handful’ of women, they neglected to recognise Irish Muslim schoolgirl views and experiences of the wearing of the hijab (e.g., as a matter of Irish Muslim female personal choice, as a sign of freedom and love for their faith rather than deference to men, etc.).