thesefewpresidents:

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Aside from small amounts of research I’ve done on my own, reading up on wikipedia, I have no idea what happened in Ireland between 1950 and 1990.

Oh, no, see, that’s because nothing happened.

Hah!

Seriously though, while I know you’re being facetious, I just want to talk about this for a minute, because it’s something that’s been really upsetting me over the past few years. And the more I look into it, and the more I think about it, the more upset it makes me.

My Irish history class honestly ended at Independence. The second half of the text book was never even opened or let alone acknowledged. Sure, it’s been 8 years and I can’t recall the exact date we finished learning Everything We Needed To Know About Irish History To Pass The Leaving Cert, and maybe we honestly did just run out of time. But that seems like an awfully convenient place to stop teaching Irish History in a Protestant school, you know?

We learned more about the American Civil Rights movement in class than we did the Irish one. I didn’t even know we had a Civil Rights movement until I was 18, when I skipped forwards in the textbook at random because I was bored in class. It wasn’t until a few months ago when I looked it up on a whim on wikipedia that I realised how genuinely bad the Catholics had it. The border campaigns were mentioned once, in passing, in relation to a completely different matter, and I was truly led to believe that the Old and new IRA were two different things, separated by 20 years of peaceful coexistence and friendly relations.

And it wasn’t just in school either, it was at home too. It was simply never talked about. I was a nerd at school and did MUN, and at one conference it turned out that John Hume just so happened to be staying in the same hotel at the time, and he was invited to give a speech to everyone, which he graciously accepted. I honestly had no idea who he was. I recognised the name, and vaguely connected him to Northern Ireland, but that was it. Because it was an international convention he spoke a lot about the Troubles, dumbed the whole thing down so everyone was up to speed, yet I was still lost.

I’ve also met David Trimbles daughter, just bumped into her at a gig once. Again, barely recognised the name. When the Saville Report was released the manager in that bar we both worked in was Irish, and asked me what I thought. I honestly had no idea what she was talking about. I didn’t even really know what Bloody Sunday was.

Like, that is a seriously fucked up set of things to not know about your own history.

And it’s not just me. When we went back home, Dad decided to take us all on a drive round Sally Gap to show Alanah the sights and take her mind off things. Along the way he was giving it all the usual tour guide stuff, and started talking about how Protestants are viewed in Ireland. Since, you know, we were the land owners back in the day, and we were the people in Parliament who wanted more freedom in Ireland and so set in motion the whole Home Rule thing, that we held a really weird relationship, that everyone thought we were weird, but massively respected us for getting the country free.

Like, that’s so wrong even I can point out the logical flaws in it, but he genuinely believes that. He was in school during the Civil Rights era, he and his friends used to go across the border to go see bands play (namely the Undertones), back when you had to go through military checkpoints to do so, yet this is honestly how he thinks Ireland works.

It’s just … that’s just plain wrong.