Building Bridges to Intercultural Understanding: The Other in Contemporary Irish Children’s Literature

Abstract

Novelist and critic Ralph Ellison once said, ‘education is all a matter of building bridges’ (1963). This sentiment is at the ideological core of the illustrated Bridges series, published in 2009 by Irish children’s publisher, The O‘Brien Press. In light of the recent increase in immigration into Ireland since the 1990s, the resultant rapidly multilingual, ethnic, and heterogeneous growth of the ‘new Irish’ arrivals and the Irish government’s subsequent policies for inclusion and multicultural equity, this educational series of four picturebooks (Olanna’s Big Day, I Won’t Go to China, The Dreaming Tree and The Romanian Builder) was commissioned and created by The O‘Brien Press with the explicit agenda of providing a platform for multicultural education through ‘accessible’ stories based on relatable everyday situations for Irish readers aged six years onwards. Examples of Chinese, Nigerian, Brazilian and Romanian characters, workers and families living within urban Ireland were chosen as representative scenarios for exploring issues of belonging, difference, migration, and nationhood. Throughout the series, the various young Irish-born and new Irish protagonists are confronted with collisions between the familiar and the unknown, their origins and their new homeland, posing questions around what determines ‘being Irish’ in the twenty-first century.