The Leaving Cert Politics And Society Course Is Still A Pain In The Posterior

Although my earlier piece castigated the Leaving Cert History syllabus, its faults are as nothing compared to the Leaving Cert Politics and Society farce which, to his credit, Peter Caddle previously filleted here as long ago as June 2018. Bad and all as it may have been then, it has since further degenerated and the proposed reforms that are in the works will make it much worse again.

The first thing to note is that the course strives to serve two masters, those of politics and society and, as the Good Book tells us, that cannot be done. Not only do our friends on the next island recognise that by having two seperate A-level Streams, one for politics and another for sociology (not society), but they have withdrawn such courses as citizenship, critical thinking, and world development, which are at the core of this Politics and Society mishmash of a subject.

We can validate that by perusing the 2025 Leaving Cert Politics and Society exam, where we find that questions 1-a, 1-d, 1-e, 1-g, 1-h, 1-j, 1-m, 1-n, and 1-O, amongst others, concern themselves on issues of inclusion, diversity, marginalisation (rooting in rubbish bins) and global economic inequality, whereas question 2 concentrates on interpreting EU graphs and question 3 focuses on fake news and nationalism (of what sort?) as a destructive force.

The 2025 paper is, in short, all over the place and even though our own minnow Labour Party is convinced this new subject will inspire a generation of new social and political activists in Ireland, it seems the 2026 and future papers will be, like the Labour Party itself, an over hyped pedagogic flop.

To further see why that is the case, we can look at the academics involved in the proposed reforms and note that, whereas Richard Tormey’s speciality is the sociology.of ethnicity and national identity in school curricula, Dr. Mark Maguire is an anthropologist, DCU’s Dr. Bernie Collins, together with her massive EU grants, is primarily “recognized for her research on anti-bullying, gender equality, and child well-being”, Maynooth’s Dr Grace O’Grady ‘s forte is “creating a more playful and politicized practice of guidance counselling“, Maynooth’s Angela Rickard is a social justice evangelist (and writing skills) guru and DCU’s Carmel Mulcahy is an ambassador at large for the secular Educate Together Movement.

God help the students and those who doubt these secular evangelists  with their fat grants are on a good number, because the Power and People textbook Caddle’s article cites costs a hefty €16. For an e-copy, which costs nothing to reproduce!

That, to use the cliche, is not what the men of 1916 died for. I mention 1916 as the course’s creators claim that their Politics and Society mishmash was inspired by the centenary celebrations for 1916 and the events that followed it.

Not only are those events not reflected in the course but, more to the point, the 1916 Proclamation, the First Dáil ‘s declarations and constitution (which the late Kevin O’Higgins dismissed as poetry), and the 1937 Constitution do not make the cut, even though anchoring the course on those three documents would give students and teachers all the leeway they like to propound any and all viewpoints without going hopelessly adrift.

Instead of that, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael,.no doubt prodded along by the usual suspects, give us 17 key thinkers most teachers and students would have to google to see who those nonentities are. Students are lumbered with Hannah Arendt, whose doctoral thesis was on St Augustine, who does not make the cut, just as the current Pope, who follows his teachings and that of Pope Leo 111’s Rerum Novarum, which, with Pope Xi1s Quadragesismo Anno, is one of the classics of social thought, is likewise too much of a lightweight for these heavyweight chumps.

Instead, we have the long-winded buffoon, Karl Marx, with his pathetically deterministic view of history, British sociologist Sylvia Walby, who has made a nice living raging against the patriarchy, Palestinian literary critic Edward Said and sometime linguistics professor Noam Chomsky. This is more reminiscent of Forrest Gump’s Box of Chocolates than it is of a serious academic course crafted by serious academics.

Although Caddle and the Iona Institute’s David Quinn have both attacked the curriculum for being too left-wing, its bigger fault is that it is devoid of any real content and, stripped of their fancy titles, those who drafted it do not have a clue what they are doing both in terms of curriculum development and in terms of stunting the intellectual growth of the Leaving Cert students they want to serve their gruel to.

The first problem with this course is because it is cross-disciplinary and has essentially been hijacked by those from outside those disciplines, it falls on its face.The solution there is to go for one discipline or the other or to take a leaf out of Albion’s book and scrap the entire course.

The next major problem is that one must get the basics right before moving on to greater things or, in this case, the 17 pillars of diverse sources of wisdom those who drafted the course hide behind. If one wants to instead take the philosophy route, then Michael Sugrue’s excellent online philosophy lectures give us an excellent template to follow. If one wishes to look at the intersection between politics and society, then one has to focus and, as this is the Irish Leaving Cert, the best country to focus on is Ireland with the documents I have already alluded to. If one has an entirely different agenda, as these jokers seem to have, then the best recourse might be to get well paid by summoning the spectre of 1916 and joining Silvia Walby and other nonentities in incoherently ranting against the patriarchy, Dublin’s rubbish bins as well as the rest of the world and all therein.