"You will not find a reference to "brainwashing children to hate", or distorting or lying or anything resembling any of these things." – Challenges Jim Carrroll

He then supplies a link - HOLOHAN – from which we get the following:

1: "The perception is common among Irish teachers, politicians and historians that there were serious deficiencies and flaws in the approach to the teaching of history and in the process of curricular development. These defects are thought to have contributed to the phenomenon, as expressed by Joe Lee, that 'the modern Irish, contrary to popular impression, have little sense of history. What they have is a sense of grievance which they choose to dignify by calling it history'

Taken directly from "Teaching Irish Independence: History in Irish Schools, 1922-72", by John O'Callaghan.

2: Platitudes on the harmful effects of biased history teaching should consider that for most of the period, apart from the endeavours of the Irish Historical Studies school, academic history itself progressed little beyond an aspiration to objectivity

For developments in academic scholarship, see Theo Moody (ed.), Irish historiography 1936-71 (Dublin, 1971).

3: "I believe it is necessary to stress again the great responsibility the teachers of any nation have for the way they interpret history and pass it on to the youth of their country. I believe that if history could be taught in such a fashion that it would help to create harmony among people rather than division and hatred, it would serve this nation and all nations better."

Statement by the Coroner at the inquest into the death of Lord Mountbatten in 1979 – that glorious occasion where the bold Fennian men sallied forth against near impossible odds and successfully murdered a 79 year old man and two teenage boys, one of whom was Irish, who were out for a days fishing, four others were seriously injured, one of them Lady Doreen Brabourne aged 83 died from her injuries the following day. How proud Pearse and Connolly must have been.

This comment reflects the assumption that Irish history teaching propagated a prejudiced and potentially dangerous account of Irish history; that it presented a jingoistic version of Irish history to young people and was an underlying factor in Irish Republican Army (IRA) violence because it instilled hatred of England as an evil oppressor and glorified the militancy of the campaign for independence.

4: James Dillon, speaking in the Dáil in April 1959, felt that an interesting survey would be an enquiry into 'the places of education of the internees recently released from the Curragh Camp'. Dillon was concerned with the kind of instruction they received, where they got it and from whom. A comprehensive survey would certainly help to put allegations about the role of nationalist-motivated history teaching as a determining factor in republican violence in context.

Hey Jim numbers are building- three historians, nope four counting O'Callaghan, a Coroner and the leader of Fine Gael, all thought there was a link. But let's see how this survey got on:

The ongoing failure of the Department of Education to open its records to full public scrutiny continues to hinder research on history teaching. While history teaching has not suffered from academic neglect, much of the work in the area has been from a pedagogical rather than a historical perspective.

Now I wonder why the Department of Education would object to public scrutiny of its records relating to the teaching of history in Ireland? Ah but wait a minute Dev was still alive in 1959 wasn't he and Irish History ended at 1921, the Civil War that de Valera needlessly instigated was never taught, didn't happen according to Ruth Dudley Edwards, and she should know she sat through the lessons where the Irish Civil War was totally ignored and by-passed.

5: In his 1992 thesis, Doherty argued that the vague minimalism that characterised formal guidelines governing the teaching of history reflected the limited nature of central control over education, and facilitated a populist conception of that history. He showed that so inadequate was teachers' professional training and so vulnerable were their terms of employment to managerial and local pressure, they became actively engaged in the promulgation of socially acceptable beliefs.

Socially accepted beliefs do not amount to history.

6: However, the conception of history and history teaching as a method of restoring and renewing the Gaelic past did not consider those whose past was not a Gaelic one. The emergence of a new consensus on Irish identity meant that those who did not subscribe to it, in political, cultural or historical terms, became outsiders in the state. Roy Foster's review of the cultural revival movement was highly critical: 'the emotions focused by cultural revivalism around the turn of the century were fundamentally sectarian and even racialist'

Whoops Jim there's another one.