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Separate but equal? Schools and the politics of religion and diversity in the Republic of Ireland focuses on the historical and current place of religion in the Irish education system from the perspective of children’s rights and citizenship. It offers a critical analysis of the political, cultural and social forces that have perpetuated the patronage system, looks at the ways in which the denominational model has been adapted to increased religious and cultural diversity in Irish society and shows that recent changes have failed to address persistent discrimination and the absence of respect for freedom of conscience. It relates current debates on the denominational system and the role of the State in education to Irish political thought and conceptions of national identity in Ireland, showing the ways in which such debates reflect a tension between nationalist-communitarian and republican political outlooks. There have been efforts towards accommodation and against instances of discrimination within the system, but Irish educational structures still privilege communal and private interests and hierarchies over equal rights, either in the name of a de facto ‘majority’ right to religious domination or by virtue of a deeply flawed and limited view of ‘parental choice’.
The Conclusion returns to the book’s central preoccupations of citizenship, equality, and community by way of an extended close reading of Benjamin Markovits’s 2015 novel, You Don’t Have to Live Like This.
supporting gender discrimination and unequal treatment, rejecting their content, as the examples below illustrate. To fill the normative void, their campaigns promote a new normative framework based on the combined norms of citizenship equality, inclusion, and anti-discrimination, thereby legitimising the equal treatment of women. Although these norms in and of themselves cannot be
that citizenship's in/out form has difficulty processing. Citizenship law is no longer well equipped to sort inauthentic claims from authentic ones. The scalar nature of attachment also challenges citizenship's equality condition. To adapt to variable levels of membership, citizenship might have to abandon equality. But it is not clear what remains of citizenship without equality, since equality is located at its ideological core. The spaces we inhabit do not have
given society 4 4 S chools and the politics of religion and diversity as opposed to being applied only to a group based on a set of pre-established criteria of belonging. From this perspective, the term ‘inclusion’ can refer both to the collective dimension of social/national cohesion and to the individual dimension of citizenship equality. As Kathleen Lynch shows, full inclusion has to be underpinned by the notion of equality: a child may only feel fully included in the school group if he/she is considered as equal to the others, without any form of
hand, whilst observing and respecting cultural difference on the other? This politics simply cannot be unequivocal because it must always contain within itself this Critical overview and conclusion 173 inherent doubleness (which is not a ‘duplicity’): one register that acknowledges the metaphysic of modernity, its institutions and its governing ensembles of knowledge such as the state, citizenship, equality, social science and the rule of law etc.; and, on the other hand, another register which exceeds and resists that metaphysic because it does not observe the
and their inclusion as citizens of the revolutionary French Republic in 1794 represented a historic triumph of Enlightenment principles over slavery, colonialism, and nascent racial ideology. But while it may be appealing to view the Haitian revolutionaries as early champions of a kind of democratic, Western liberalism,these categories do not easily fit the social realities of early Haiti: a society characterized by caudillismo, marronage, and class conflict over forced labour. To be sure, ideologies of liberty, republicanism, citizenship, equality, and ‘resistance
. Some, though not all, of the key material and symbolic elements of a lasting democratic settlement were now in place. Notes 1 By democratisation, we refer to the ‘net shift toward citizenship, breadth of citizenship, equality of citizenship, binding consultation, and protection’. Charles
multicultural but where WHISCs would keep the upper hand. That such a model would be adopted naturally in Ireland is to be expected since it does not put into question the traditional, culturally oriented sense of Irish identity in any fundamental way. There are some signs of an alternative model, however, that of a truly open and inclusive society that would go beyond its ‘historic’ characteristics by accepting the intercultural dynamic. Such a model would draw a distinction between a necessarily multicultural society and the political community founded on citizenship