An excavation of the racialised politics of viability underpinning education policy in Ireland

This paper unearths the improvisational nature of Irish state exigencies and their central contribution to racialisation in and through schooling. The analysis unravels white-Irishness through gender and Traveller membership, in terms of its links to the state's early efforts at intelligibility and associated politics of desirable and viable subject regulation. It is suggested that mutating theocentric, mercantile and liberal equality paradigms attempt to privilege certain subjects as more viable than others in contemporary Ireland through race, but also class, gender and other vectors of power. Three technologies of potential exclusion through inclusionary state discourses are identified for minority ethnic school subjects. These are language support, pop-anti-racist terminology and the politics of school access and school provision. Ultimately it is argued that supporting ‘integration’ and ‘anti-racism’ in Irish education might require conceptual and political vigilance of the terms of the ‘inclusive state’ at all times.