Ireland has seen an increase of national populism and far right organising in recent years. INAR monitoring notes 700 reports of racism in 2020. Of these, criminal offences including incitement to hatred constituted 159 reports. Anti-racist community education is crucial to tackling these worrying trends. At the initiation of the project we identified 3 key organisational challenges to which we wanted to respond. 1:BUILDING A COHERENT ANTI RACIST EDUCATION STRATEGY FOR IRELAND 2: A LACK OF HIGHLY SKILLED ANTI-RACIST EDUCATORS 3: SAFETY AND RESILIENCE CHALLENGES FOR ANTI-RACIST EDUCATORS These were formulated into the following project objectives Obj 1: Develop mechanisms to monitor the effectiveness, impact, distribution and improved quality of anti-racist education in Ireland Obj 2: Strengthen a team of skilled educators with increased competences to handle challenging conversations and able to support learners to develop critical and nuanced perspectives on racism. Obj 3: Increase our staff capacity to offer community education that promotes collaboration, tolerance and diversity across communities Obj 4: Increase the safety, psychosocial resilience and retention of anti-racist education providers and learners in Ireland
ENAR ( Ireland) henceforth Irish Network Against Racism (INAR), our registered trading name, support more than 190 community organisations across Ireland to develop and deliver community adult education programmes, public research and policy development related to anti racism. Key adult training work includes: STAND AGAINST training for ethnic minority leaders; Face Up to Racism Trade Union leader training; Traveller leader training, Face Facts working against hate crimes training; and Responding to Racism in the Community community leaders training. We also work with public bodies and local authorities. INAR works cross-regionally and intergenerationally. We also work at the international level. INAR is an active member of the European Network Against Racism based in Brussels, a network of 160 organisations from 30 European States. INAR actively collaborates with the ENAR to coordinate research initiatives, education and mobilisations, bringing a European dimension to Ireland and vice-versa. We work primarily with community educators, trade union leaders, and people working in public offices training them in anti-racist curriculum. Our main learners are adults working in informal or non formal adult education contexts.