I went to a grim Victorian school with classes of 40 or 50 children. It was a very rigid and unimaginative education, but it did teach us the three Rs.
From Tom Paulin
'Ulysses' is the greatest anti-racist text in the English language, and it challenges right from the beginning the vicious racism which lies near the foundations of the Irish Free State and of the Irish republic.
Many black people I know are proud of the Irish part of their heritage - an Irish grandparent, say - but they recognise that many people believe in a form of racial purity. And it is from that belief that prejudice starts.
Unfortunately, in the north and the south of Ireland, intolerant habits are part of the fabric of emotion, part of the identity crisis which afflicts the population of the country.
Again and again, I find something eerie in many Irish occasions - the unrelenting whiteness, the emotional tribal attachments, the violent prejudices lurking beneath apparently pleasant social surfaces, the cosy smugness of belonging.
Is the biographer an artist who can and should exist on equal terms with the dramatist, fiction writer and poet? The short and robust answer is, 'Certainly not.'
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