Before emigrating from Ireland to teach in England in 2006, I assumed British people would know as much about me as I did about them. I was put right just one year into the job, in an east London staffroom, when a colleague teased: “Why the salad, Jen? I thought you Irish loved a potato.”
Contrary to the stereotype, Irish people don’t just happen to love potatoes. Pushed on to infertile land in west Ireland, most notoriously at Oliver Cromwell’s command, farmers had been encouraged to grow the ill-fated crop by their British colonisers. But when the blight came, little was done to help them. The resulting Great Hunger brought the death or emigration of 2 million people – more than a quarter of the Irish population – between 1845 and 1852.
Potato jokes aren’t funny to me – government turning its back on its own people during a time of crisis rarely is – but I heard dozens of similar gags during my 12 years in English and international British schools. They were never nasty – they just came from a place of absolute ignorance. Rubbing shoulders with colleagues in history departments, I quickly came to a realisation: while Irish students arguably learn too much about Ireland’s colonisation, British students certainly learn too little.
In every Irish classroom, children are reared on stories of oppression and rebellion. Every child understands the intricacies of Anglo-Irish relations. As a secondary English teacher, I can’t avoid plays, novels and poetry dealing with our complicated relationship with Britain. Irish students leave school with the historical and emotional weight of colonisation on their shoulders.
Compare that to Britain, where teaching English rightly involves texts focused on class, misogyny and injustice, often set around the second world war, but rarely relating to Britain’s relationship with Ireland, despite Ireland’s literary clout and proximity.
In 2016, my school embarked on a project on the British empire. Irish media were consumed by the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, a historic turning point in the fight against British rule. Naively, I offered a book on the subject to our head of history – it was returned to my desk the following morning. I should have known better.
Studying Othello in my A-level English class, we had a debate on race. I asked my intelligent, wonderful students whether white people can experience ethnic prejudice as seen in the play. No, they said. “What about Britain’s treatment of the Irish?” I asked. They looked at me blank-faced – of course they did. In response, I told them about the infamous signs my grandfather saw while living in London in the 50s: “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs.”
This failure of British schools to teach students anything about Ireland has far-reaching consequences. For one, if educated British people do not understand the difference between Ireland and the United Kingdom, they cannot understand Brexit. Take the Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen, who in 2018 confidently declared English people had a right to an Irish passport due to the common travel area. Or how about Boris Johnson, who, when concerns were raised about the possibility of a hard border, brushed off fears as “pure millennium bug stuff”, and later as a “folly”. Try using that word to any of the families and communities affected by decades of violence and devastating loss.
Even now, as Ireland and Britain continue to grapple with highly sensitive trade agreements in the wake of Brexit, knowledge of this kind matters. In June, Liz Truss, then foreign secretary and probably Britain’s next prime minister, summed up so much when, with a straight face, she pronounced taoiseach as “tea-sock”. In delicate negotiations, considering the historical British policy of eradicating the Irish language in Ireland, it’s paramount that elected politicians, at the very least, get Irish names right. When Queen Elizabeth spoke a few words in Irish at a state dinner in Dublin Castle, the former seat of British power in Ireland, she did something very significant. She showed Irish people and Irish culture her respect. Politicians must look to their recently deceased and beloved monarch for inspiration in this regard.
While British people are taught not to know – not to care – about Ireland’s history, Irish people carry the pain of it around with us. Every political gaffe, every time an Irish celebrity is wrongly claimed as British, every mix-up of Britain, Ireland and the United Kingdom – every time it happens, is corrected and happens again – sets our relationship back. It makes Irish people feel as if their nationality, their distinct cultural difference, is a detail too insignificant to learn about. Yes, it’s time we move on – but to do so requires respect and knowledge on both sides.
Jennifer Horgan is a secondary school teacher, Irish Examiner columnist and author of ‘O Captain, My Captain’: One Teacher’s Hope for Change in the Irish Education System
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