Ideologies Are Not Your Friends: An Irish Academic Memoir

Ideologies Are Not Your Friends reflects on an academic career spent teaching, researching, and writing about Irish culture and society during a period of large-scale immigration and accelerated social change. Bryan Fanning makes the case for a broad conception of Irish Studies that includes the social sciences as well as the study of Irish history, literature, art, and culture. He examines arguments about immigration, Irish culture and identity through the lens of intellectual history and personal memoir. This book is aimed at academics, students, and general readers with interests in scholarship and debates about present-day Irish society, and in interpretations of Irish past. It also examines outside intellectual influences upon Irish debates that have played out in academia, in politics and society.

"This is a significant book. Fanning’s academic work is provocative and critical. The memoir offers great insight into his ideas, his career and the many debates he has engaged in. I would describe the book as refreshing and most of all very brave." ― Professor Eoin Devereux, University of Limerick, Ireland

Bryan Fanning is Professor of Migration and Social Policy at University College Dublin. He is the author of several books including Migration and Social Policy in a changing world: histories challenges and dilemmas, Three Roads to the Welfare State: Liberalism, social democracy and Christian democracy and Public Morality and the Culture Wars: The triple divide.