Jim,
You have quoted a novelist and an American Jesuit

Dishonest Jim.
One was an Irish Jesuit priest currently teaching philosophy in a US university, and the other a correspondent on the Irish Times who agreed with me on that point.
Neither described the Irish as ignorant of their own history
Neither did I.

I am sorry I misremembered whose wild claim I responded to.
Do you distance yourself from it?

What she actually said that the "revisionists" who avoided placing direct blame for the Famine on anybody taught that to children , and that ended in the 1930s.

Completely untrue Jim!
This is what she actually said,

"To some extent, these beliefs were fostered by the state school system south of the border, which itself arose out of particular historical circumstances. In 1922, for example, the Free State government instructed history teachers that pupils should be 'imbued with the ideals and aspirations of such men as Thomas Davis and Patrick Pearse' and that they should emphasise 'the continuity of the separatist idea from Tone to Pearse' (see Francis T. Holohan, 'History teaching in the Irish Free State 1922-35' in HI Winter 1994).

" Accordingly, in many Irish schools, a heroic but simplistic view of Irish history emerged, a morality story replete with heroes and villains. This approach, however, was subsequently challenged by the Irish academic establishment. In the 1930s, a number of leading Irish academics—following the lead of British historians earlier in the century—set an agenda for the study of Irish history, which placed it on a more professional and scientific basis in terms of research methods and source materials. At the same time this approach also demanded the systematic revision and challenging of received wisdoms or unquestioned assumptions. What was specific to Ireland, however, was the declared mission to challenge received nationalist myths, and by implication, although less centrally, loyalist myths. Thus, at the launch of the influential Irish Historical Studies journal in 1938, the editors stated their commitment to replace 'interpretive distortions' with 'value-free history'. To a large extent, however, this debate took place within the rarefied atmosphere of academia and failed to percolate down into the schoolrooms either north or south of the border."

So, the Irish school system pushed "nationalist myths" at Irish children instead of objective history. That is brain washing, and she says it has not been changed. The person quoted in my Indy article called them "gobshites" for putting such shit in his schoolbooks.