Katy Hayes: Have young people in Ireland acquired referred coloniser's guilt?

Poems by the Irish writers Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland have been dropped from the exam curriculum in British schools. They will be replaced by work from poets of diverse ethnic backgrounds, including British-Somali, British-Guyanese and Ukrainian. The Oxford, Cambridge and Royal Society of Arts exam board announced the change last month. This could be a case of not letting a good crisis go to waste: “decolonising” the curriculum offered a fine opportunity to get rid of those pesky Irish. The most egregious “cancellation” is of the play Translations by Brian Friel, a brilliant dissection of colonialism that puts it right up to the British.