The Death of the Irish Canon

In the opening vignette of the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Father John Conmee S.J. strolls from Dublin’s Mountjoy Square to the North Circular Road, on his way to a Christian Brothers’ school in Artane, to help a family in distress, while intermittently musing about the good work the Catholic Church has done not only in Dublin but even on the missions in far-off Africa.

Fast forward to today, and Conmee, together with Joyce and their entire ecosystem, are being booted bag and baggage out of Ireland’s entire educational system, and this is even more farcical than were the attempts of the French Revolutionaries to supplant French Catholicism with their own pottage of the Supreme Being and their egalitarian decree to raze all church steeples because it was not egalitarian that a steeple could be higher or more aesthetically appealing than any other building. Plus ça change!

Because Ireland lacks France’s developed paganism, Irish efforts to replicate this French nightmare are just that bit clumsier and clunkier, and nowhere more obviously than where its Leaving Certificate English, history, religious studies and politics & society courses combine to groom students and teachers into replacing Joyce’s Jesuit-derived critical thinking with doublethink, as Orwell famously put it in 1984.

Although Orwell, Milton, and Dickens are but three of the anti-Catholics who graced the Leaving Cert’s English syllabus in “Catholic-controlled” [sic] Ireland back in more enlightened days, their literary talent warranting their inclusion is widely acknowledged. This is in marked contrast to modern poems like Paula Meehan’s ‘The Statue of the Virgin Mary Speaks,’ which have supplanted their works in Leaving Cert English and which can make no such claim, not least because modern poetry is very much a niche area where, much like in 1984, Animal Farm or Revolutionary France, an intellectually incestuous clique decrees what the rest of us must imbibe.

This bias is carried over into subjects like history, where modern sociological motifs like the patriarchy are privileged at the expense of giving Irish teenagers a solid grounding in history’s fundamental dynamics. Although examples abound, the interested reader can simply compare and contrast the verbosity of questions in Leaving Cert History or English with the much more professional and linguistically straightforward way they are still worded in the applied and STEM subjects.

Though much of this malaise in English and history is caused by New Age academic apparatchiks shoehorning their own half-baked biases into courses where they patently don’t belong, this process is far more pronounced in the politics & society course. The course, as even its proponents admit, is a mishmash of sociological musings on contemporary and historical Ireland with nothing concrete at its core, apart from turning the teachers and their pupils into socially aware, if largely uninformed, citizen commentators on modern Irish society and far-away Africa as well.

Intellectually debilitating as the course in politics & society is, religious studies really takes the biscuit in vacuity. Whereas Joyce’s religious education and upbringing infuses his entire corpus, there is nothing beyond bargain basement sociology in the Leaving Cert religious studies syllabus; one would glean far more by skimming through the relevant pages on religion in a Lonely Planet guide to Italy, Greece or Spain. That is because this course’s core function is to replace religious formation, Catholic formation in particular, with a muted version of the worst anti-clerical nihilism of the French Revolution.

It is one thing to be passionately anti-Catholic as the morally upright Dostoevsky was, but it is quite another to allow that bile to be your guiding light, as those involved with the Educate Together movement who organised anti-Catholic protests in Castleknock have; these concerned parents believe that their mercurial ethos is better furthered by having neurodivergent Australian transsexuals mentor their children than by following the trajectory of Conmee and Joyce. Good luck to their unfortunate children in their induced Brave New World.

There is, however, a further problem with tossing Conmee, Joyce, and all like them onto the pyre, including Joyce’s The Dead, widely regarded as the best short story ever written. Like all of Joyce’s work, it does not pass muster for the Leaving Cert. To add commission to this blatant sin of omission, the Irish public library system barely contains a dozen copies of Joyce’s Dubliners or Ulysses, yet it contains literally hundreds of copies of Juno Dawson’s What’s The T? and yet more of This Book is Gay, both of which can also be very easily downloaded for free from sites sympathetic to the transsexual and allied dystopian movements of which Dawson’s gruel is an integral part.

The relevance of Dawson’s books is that, unlike Joyce’s, they are being promulgated as part of the new formation process of intellectually opiating vulnerable children, even though their medical and sexual advice is almost certainly criminally irresponsible and Dawson’s clumsily written English is entirely inappropriate for the target audience—or for any other audience for that matter. And, as for vulnerable children supposedly needing quasi-pornographic comic book fare such as Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe (also widely available in the Irish libraries online), they would be far better served by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or The Brothers Karamazov, works that illuminate the innocence and wonder of youth so memorably captured in Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill, with its celebrated evocation of summers on his aunt Annie’s farm.

As for the state-subsidised output of Dawson, Kobabe and their ilk, it is not remotely in the league of J.K. Rowling, whose rare gift is to strike exactly the right note for young readers. Their clumsy prose raises suspicion that their prominence—and their regular appearances on Ireland’s most popular television programmes—owes less to literary or artistic merit than to a concerted effort by domestic and foreign interests to shape what Irish children read.

Though this wide-scale grooming of Irish children and the concomitant subversion of the Irish educational system have been repeatedly brought to the attention of Ireland’s governing class by concerned politicians and lobby groups, they and their mini-armies of civil servants supporting them have feigned childlike innocence and total ignorance of these gross abuses, even though knowing what is being forced down the necks of Irish children is a core part of their remit. Those ignoramuses in power are a key part of Ireland’s ongoing slide into the mire.

Irish parents and grandparents best quickly realise that their children’s and grandchildren’s futures are being shortchanged by much the same sleight of hand that bamboozled the French people in 1789 and that culminated for them in the frozen wastelands of Russia and the crimson lakes of Waterloo. And though the endgame of this ongoing colonisation and subversion of the Irish educational system will be much more muted than Napoleon’s demise, it will be no less soul-destroying for those Irish students made permanently unemployable by being the Leaving Cert’s sacrificial lambs.