In a draft of the state’s new proposed “social, personal, and health education” curriculum, Ireland will urge students to examine their “privileged status” if they are white, male, or ethnically Irish. The spunky news outlet Gript asked the minister of education about this. She promptly dissembled.
There are two interesting things about this proposed curriculum. The first is that in some way it contains a historic reversal of Irish self-conception, which some writers have parodied as a commitment to “MOPE” — the Irish as “most oppressed people ever.”
But the second is that this entire ideology is an American export. This whole vocabulary, and the trained behaviors to emit it, was only recently built on America’s historic social divisions. It has very little to do with the Irish republic’s treatment of minority groups, whether Jewish, Traveler, or Protestant, or its recent wave of immigrants. Many of Ireland’s recent immigrants come from privileged backgrounds and go into the country’s highest-status jobs at multinational tech companies in Dublin. Are they and their children really less privileged than a white Dubliner from Finglas? The state thinks they should be taught so.