It was a Crown Colony and Ireland was still part of the union so it is very likely you can as long as you have the full documentation.
The exception was Berlin, both sides of the wall had 20 century history as an obligatory part of the history curriculum because it was part of the Four Power Agreement that actually had the rehabilitation of the German population that included the 1933-45 story in gory detail. In the four zones of occupation apart from Berlin, it was only the DDR that taught a version of the story in all schools. Several of my colleagues in the institute I was attached to were studying Jewish migration out of Germany. The Berliners among them knew the history very well, the West Germans knew very little at all. It is parallel to the way UK history omits a great deal and is mostly about England in England and Wales (still the same curriculum) and Scotland in Scotland.
However, there was a gem here when our daughter came home with a question about Waterloo. The version delivered, it was primary school by the way, was that the French were going to win the battle until the Prussians made a rearguard attack out of the forest, therefore the French only lost because the Prussians and English cheated. Another gem was showing how the WW2 invasion turned left into Belgium after the D-Day landings and de Gaulle and his army aided by the resistance liberated France. That the bulk of the Free French Army had to wait several days after D-Day until landing craft could return to pick them up and bring them was never in the story. When I gave my daughter a print out of GIs with girls in the streets of Paris on the day of the German surrender of the city, the teacher told her it was all propaganda photographed several years later. In short, there are probably very many more people with a more fictional than factual slant on history everywhere than we give credit for. In that respect, the little known details like Ireland are not so unusual although that is no justification for partial histories.
I have (had) three Irish grandparents and an Irish mother - all born in Ireland. A nice easy "pass". When I applied for the Irish passport I got my cousin, who is the priest that conducted the marriage of Bertie Ahern's daughter to the "Westlife" singer (he is a friend of Bertie), to certify my photograph. The application was rejected as Michael was not living in London, where I was! The doctor that I was registered with, who never set eyes on me, was apparently acceptable!
True.
Unfortunately, the history is too shameful for the English to want to be reminded.
But it is also true that the English working classes were treated little better than people in the provinces and colonies and since they didn't have the vote until quite recently, it could be argued that they were not to blame. The aristocracy, mostly descended from the Norman invaders of 1066, held most of the power.
Indentured Scots too, to prevent them returning home just as their Irish fellow bondsmen and women. Any of them who did the slightest thing wrong, such as peaking to a guard without being asked to speak, would be sold as a slave as punishment. There is a famous poster for Catholics and Heathens. That is to say Irish and Scots and Africans, Catholics at £4 a man, £2 a woman and £1 10s for a child, respectively heathens £20 for a man, £25 for woman and £12 for a child. Ironically,the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Britain began campaigning for an end to the Transatlantic slave trade from West Africa to the New World, which Britain dominated by then, in 1787. They eventually became the Anti-Slavery Society in 1832 (today Anti-Slavery International). The Irish anti-slavery movement, the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society, was led by Daniel O’Connell, who from as early as 1840 American abolitionists were claiming that his involvement in the debate exceeded that of either Thomas Clarkson or William Wilberforce whose influence led Joseph Sturge to found the Anti-Slavery Society. O'Connell is best known for his influence in ending enslavement of Africans in the USA but he also campaigned to end the 'Catholic' trade which came with the eventually emancipation of Catholicism in Ireland and Scotland which was seen as simply an alternative form of legitimate employment of felons known as indenture for life and bond servitude.
I have worked for Anti-Slavery on and off on contracts in the child labour field sine the late 1970s. I have sat fascinated in their little but excellent library reading this stuff until I had the gall in my mouth from anger about the exclusion of these historical details from what we are taught or people generally know. Nobody has ever followed through with an apology of the kind made occasionally to descendants of African slaves, of which I fully approve and think have never been sincere enough anyway, and doubt they ever will.
Most history books are written by the winning side, to justify their actions and show themselves in a good light. With very few exceptions, all the war crimes are found to have been committed by the losers......
As a sixth former, mind you that was 1964-66, I chose the European history option. Two thirds of that seemed to be about which battles and wars the English fought against whom, but only when they won of course, and then we had a couple of classes about the Great Depression, French Revolution and Russian Revolution. The American Revolution, War and Declaration of Independence got a few passing comments. Our history teacher was a young, 'right on' left wing, trade union active man. I bumped into him whenever the NUT had conferences and other events where I was asked to speak. One day I asked him something about Internationalism over a cuppa, in which I have always been interested, and remember him telling me that I would need to ask a political historian. Somehow I even found his version of history in a kind of strait jacket that only allowed his ilk to see 'their' country with the rest of the world on the blurry edges.
I have two passports - British and Irish. I tend to use the Irish one more, especially in West Africa, because no-one seems to hate the Irish. You get a totally different reaction when you produce it. The funniest though was crossing a remote border post from Senegal to Gambia - the border guard had to look up Ireland re visa requirements, as he had never heard of it.
Epitomised by when I was teaching a small seminar group of anthropology postgraduate students and we turned to the subject of slavery and the forced migrations of Africans to other continents. Of around 12 students, half were English and neither knew that England (not the UK because it still did not exist) was one of the initiators of the slave trade, once had the biggest in the world and much of the wealth of contemporary aristocracy and the royal family came from that. They were shocked. An Irish student knew that in detail and then added the bit about the forced migrations of the Irish and Scots who became bonded labour in the New World, one notch up from slavery. One young man accused him of lying and that none of it was true, then turned on me for the same. A German student present told him that the genocide that came with slavery and the introduction of European diseases, those from other parts of the world and STDs alone in Africa outnumbered what his people did after 1933 although the intent was never as evil. The one who protested never completed the degree, the rest of the English students found out and produced very good but humble papers on the topic.
It is very rare for countries to teach their children about the most shameful periods of their history and England has much to answer for in the way they treated the Irish.
Only the Germans seem to be able to squarely face up to their past misdeeds. I believe they are better for that.
I was once made to go to the front of the class and stand with my hands on my head facing the blackboard for the rest of the period for asking the same question about Scotland. The teacher told us all about the union, how the English won the 1745 Jacobite rising but no mention of the Scots getting as far south as Derby. From what my niece who studied history at university says, school was worse by her time and at university one only found out by asking or using the library but in so-called British history neither Ireland or Scotland were much more than a passing footnote. She lived in Cork for eight years, so through pre-school and into secondary, where she learned history that included the rest of the British Isles and with Scots blood got answers when she asked. So she knew some of the questions to ask which, apparently, not all history lecturers could answer.
Debra, I have met many English people who told me the same - that the never studied Irish history at school. It seems strange but when you do study it, and better understand the histroy between these two countries, it's not so surprising.
Too right, for example at the Le P'tit Loup in Lalinde every second Friday more or less there is a group who play Irish music. It is instrumental only, the man who plays Uilleann pipes impressed somebody from County Cork I took for a beer when they were playing. He offered to sing a few songs, in Gaeilge, plus played some penny whistle. Audience came more or less out of the woodwork from who knows where, probably the cafés where they drink a beer with no music...
Yes, why not - Ireland manages to condense quite a lot of useful historical themes (issues like protectionism, national disaster, emigration, colonialism, struggle for independence, neutrality in conflict, religious communitarianism, joining the EU, economic boom & bust etc etc) into a fairly short time; and it is our (France's) neighbour too, across the sea... ;-) & of course they do a good PR job with music & films that teenagers like, so a good candidate really for study. And we tend to like the Irish, for no particular reason....
We do all sorts of things in Lycée in English, it is just a question of how we can tie in our personal areas of interest/expertise with the requirements of the PROGRAMME ;-) my pupils get to learn about India, surrogate mothers, agribusiness, gene therapy, food from insects, Holbein, the Reformation and all sorts of other things...
When I was at Grammar School in the 60s, my A-level History only dealt with England and bits about Wales and Scotland, when dealing with the Industrial Revolution. In the Special papers, however, I got a chance to display what I had soaked up at home, from borrowing library books from the excellent Harris Library in Preston, about larger medieval issues and following up into the new world of Irish history. The subject was "Was there ever a Merry England?" I looked at it from a wider British Isles sense, it got me an "A" :)
The last time I went back to Preston, in 1982, the Harris had swept away all those excellent "weighty tomes" that I'd devoured, and substituted them with "meaningful contemporary literature", gah!
When I was a raw postgraduate I specialised in migration studies as an anthropologist. Whilst my special area was South America, being of Scots origins with family dispersed in various former colonies I got interested in the Celtic diaspora. It depends how far you go back how people got where they did. Many Irish folk were sent to the Americas, the ones in parts of what became the USA were often bond servants, that is to say one step up above slaves, or were indentured. that was also a form of servitude or labour system whereby young people paid for their passage to the New World by working for an employer for a certain number of years unpaid, usually far too long. It was common practice in the 18 century in British colonies in North America.
The Great Famine saw mass starvation, debilitating disease and emigration from Ireland between 1845 and 1852. Roughly one million were estimated to have emigrated.
Consequently the diaspora consists of as from 1700 to the present time between nine and ten million people born in Ireland emigrated, including those who went to the UK after the Republic became independent. This is considerably more than the population of Ireland at its historic peak during the 1830s in the range of 8.5 million. Between 1830 and 1914 around five million of them went to the USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand in that order. Several tens of thousands also went to South American countries. O'Higgins was one of Peru's national heroes, Argentina has several famous descendants of Irish migrants as well.
Records are relatively easy to find but you have to start from the present and work back with leaps forward to find out where people were born and then when and where they went from precisely where. The actual details only exist where old documents have been retained, which is an absolute minimum of them all of course.
As for Ireland in the national curriculum, it would seem unlikely to me since the emphasis in on French and then broad world history and country studies not really their style. As for Irish history. Well I think after the 'history' between the UK and Ireland in the UK it was shunned generally. There are many more books than one can read nowadays. being a Scot I have mainly stuck to those but when looking through things about the Celtic world I have noticed lots about Ireland. I think that rather than looking at, for instance, Amazon start looking for an on line annotated bibliography of some kind. Find what appeals and then look at Amazon etc for sourcing books.