Colin Sheridan is a writer and columnist. A former officer in the Irish Defence Forces he has extensive deployment experience as a peacekeeper with the United Nations, having lived and worked in the former Yugoslavia, West Africa, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine.
There are few things more Irish than a hike up the moral high ground. A pot of tea, maybe? A hot whiskey to put manners on a cold? But moral high ground?
We ascend that peak like a master sherpa with a chip on his shoulder. Me included. Particularly in the company of internationals, and especially if that company hails from an empire. Which is why it’s so important that we check our very bespoke Irish privilege; that of being self-appointed rapporteurs for injustice, despite having suffered very little of it ourselves.
This week, novelist, academic, and cultural critic Sunny Singh posted something on social media which, while not directly aimed at Ireland or the Irish, should strike a blow to our collective ego, and give cause for reflection.
In Sunny Singh's words...
“Protip for good white people,” Singh wrote on X. “There IS an answer when asked ‘are you racist?’ — ‘Being born and raised in white supremacy means all of us hold racialised worldviews. But I am learning about racism and working on changing my worldview and myself.’”
Reading it brought a kind of uncomfortable recognition.
That faint prick of awareness one gets upon realising many of us have mastered the art of congratulating ourselves for having been historically persecuted without ever quite grappling with the fact that we can, and do, participate in systems of exclusion today.
We tell ourselves colonialism inoculated us against racism — a bit like believing that getting chickenpox as a child renders you immune to ever being a dose as an adult.
Absorbing white supremacy akin to passive smoking
Singh’s Twitter thesis suggests a more honest trajectory: Not that any of us are individually wicked, but that all of us are steeped in a culture shaped by white supremacy — and therefore capable of absorbing its logic by osmosis. Like second-hand smoke, except instead of the smell of John Player Blue clinging to your wooly jumper, you end up with assumptions you never interrogated.
Because there is something incredibly naive about our insistence that because our ancestors suffered, we cannot possibly reproduce harm in the arena of race and post-colonial trauma. Yet a changing Ireland gives the lie to that.
We’re more diverse than at any point in our history.
Our schoolyards are multilingual, our workplaces multicultural, and our marketplaces increasingly stock Jollof beside the Kimberley and Mikado. But our social reflexes? Still stuck somewhere between 1987 and The Quiet Man.
Which brings me to this radical proposal: What if we took Singh’s idea and taught it in school?
Not as an elective module sandwiched between the Famine and the Battle of the Boyne, but as a foundational skill — like reading, writing, and using jumpers for goalposts.
Imagine the curriculum:
Racism 101: How You Can Accidentally Be Part of the Problem even if your Grandparents were Oppressed by the British;
The Penal Laws and How Irish Americans Shaped the Anti-Busing Movement in Boston: A Comparative Study;
Direct Provision: The Shame We Can No Longer Pretend We Didn’t Know About;
Applied Empathy: A Practical Course in Shutting Up and Listening.
We would, at the very least, produce a generation of young people who look the topic in the eye instead of reflexively announcing: “But sure weren’t we ourselves the victims?” And in doing so we might challenge the great Irish reluctance: Admitting we might not be the centre of the moral universe.
Admitting we don't know everything
Singh’s words are powerful because they model something Ireland is still allergic to: Admitting we don’t know everything yet. That we’re learning. That we’re capable of growth beyond begrudgery and the pride we take in not being English.
If we could teach children — and, ourselves — that racism isn’t only about individual nastiness but also about the water we swim in, we might finally evolve our national self-image from “world’s most persecuted little island” to something a bit more grown-up, a bit more globally aware, and a lot less self-satisfied.
Because yes, we have our history, and yes, it shaped us. But so too is the present — an Ireland where not everyone looks like we did in the National Geographic pictures from the Aran Islands in the 1960s.
Preaching opportunity, practicing repatriation and tiered citizenship
This Ireland — for better and worse — is an Ireland of growing diversity and external interference. An Ireland that preaches opportunity, but practices repatriation flights and tiered citizenship.
If we don’t learn to recognise the biases we inherited, we’ll pass them on again — discreetly tucked into lunchboxes between the ham sandwich and the Penguin bar.
Singh, I believe, is not accusing us; she’s inviting us. To be less defensive, less mythological, less convinced that the phrase “sure we know all about oppression here” is a get-out-of-reflection jail-free card.
If that’s what she is saying, I happen to agree with her.
And I suspect many others do too, even if we wince while admitting it.
Teaching kids the truth — that we’re all shaped by systems we didn’t design, and that we have the power to dismantle and unlearn them — doesn’t diminish our past. It honours it. It ensures the Ireland we’re building isn’t just the Ireland we nostalgically imagine ourselves to be.
If nothing else, it might help us retire the notion that suffering automatically confers sainthood. Because there is another by- product of past suffering that’s too visceral to ignore — and that is this — hurt people hurt people.
The world right now is full of too many examples of just that, and we, as an aspirationally diverse and inclusive nation, should want no part in projecting our own trauma onto others.
