With specific reference to the teaching of Irish and English in Ireland, I am concerned in this paper with the experiences of language dispossession and language pedagogy. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's key concepts of "hospitality" and "monolingualism," I argue that in Ireland the first of these experiences cannot be separated…

In Ireland primary RE is a fractured, contested, complex and changing territory devoid of a common language and characterised by a proliferation of syllabi and curricula generated for increasingly diverse school types. For centuries the dynamic decolonising process has led to a questioning of former orthodoxies and an attempted de-linking of the…