The Grand Delusion: Multiculturalism in Ireland and Beyond

This is a self-published dissertation based on a case study of a Dublin multicultural primary school, focusing on the treatment of multiculturalism in children's literature. However, it is, perhaps, best seen as an indictment of the master narrative of European colonialism, which persists to this day in the ownership and management of power. The author explores the thinking and the behaviors underlying how we socially construct and pass on what is defined as multicultural and intercultural, inevitably along the lines of our unconscious meta-récit.Interculturalists as well as educators are likely to be struck by and perhaps put off by the author’s unvarnished criticism of what passes as multicultural and intercultural in the structure of societies and institutions, often a sop that subtly perpetuates racially-based class cultures, while maintaining and, inevitably, even reinforcing the enduring structures while damaging diverse identities that do not conform to a dominant often unconsciously enforced norm.The author begins with a brief historical background highlighting the modes of exclusion perpetuated by the colonial mentality, the cultural genocide of the 15th to 18th centuries, the melting-pot melting down of immigrants, which extended from the 19th to the mid-20th century and, finally, in the wake of the failure of this absorption, the pseudo-pluralism underlying the current discourse which we call multiculturalism.Examining this discourse and the theory behind it leads inevitably to the recognition that multiculturalism is about the management of ethnic minorities within a structure of economic power and control, and, pertinent to the author’s exploration of primary education, into the hands of prevailing interest groups managing it, who perhaps have the power to change things but lack the insight to do so.Thus, the author offers guidelines for teachers and administrators in selecting appropriate children's literature that truly validates the peoples and cultures, who are otherwise reduced to the sidelines of a society by both the conscious and unconscious dominance of European white identity. This is not just a matter of literary aesthetics, but a task essential to the identity confirmation of minority children, an effort needed to alleviate the harmful consequences of lowered self-esteem, lack of self-confidence, and, ultimately, substandard performance in life and work.The final part of the dissertation provides more detailed examination of the actual textbooks in school use, the images they propose for otherness, which are scant and stereotypical, and in fact simply reflect and perpetuate the religious and social structures of the dominant, in this case, Irish society. To Irish society and its educational system, this work is perhaps a wake-up call. To this interculturalist, the value of the work lies in its power to remind us that intercultural progress is not likely without an examination of the structure and function of our socially constructed master narratives.