Paper short abstract:

The paper outlines a cultural analysis of education in Ireland. This context allows an exploration of Ireland's postcolonial trajectory, from the revolutionary roots of a counter-hegemonic 'Gaelic Revivalism', to a position of economic prosperity founded on tactical dependency.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents an analysis of educational processes in the Republic of Ireland, in the context of efforts during the postcolonial era to forge a distinctively Irish form of schooling out of the existing system bequeathed by the departing colonial power. From the early years of the Irish Free State, in which there was a concerted attempt to 'decentre' the cultural hegemony of Britich colonial influence through the statutory 'gaelization' of primary education, a mood of 'Irish revivalism' propelled forward a multi-faceted project of cultural nationalism. Key influences underpinning this revival were the fetishizing of an 'authentic' Gaelic imaginary by leading scholars of the period and the major institutional part played in state policies and action by that singular marker of Irish cultural identity, the Catholic church.

The next fifty years saw Catholicism prove by far the most adhesive of these interconnected educational influences, adopting a leading role in school management that continues unabated today and distinguishes Ireland's school system as probably unique within the European Union. Meanwhile, cultural nationalism foundered in combining an austere authoritarian conservatism with a cultural protectionism that sat uneasily with a population increasingly coming to view themselves in terms of the 'nation beyond the seas'. More recently, new tensions have arisen between competitive individualist conceptions of schooling derived from the United States, and the more socially inclusive model emanating from Western Europe. A historical framework supplemented with contemporary ethnographic material illustrates how this east/west axis has been tactically deployed in shifting socioeconomic and political contexts to differentiate Irish education from its metropolitan neighbour in laying claim to 'modernising' processes that, for some postcolonial critics, are argued to be reproducing a set of reconfigured neo-colonial relationships.