Since the birth of the Irish State, there have been three official terms for children with mental disabilities, ‘mental deficiency’, ‘mental handicap’ and ‘intellectual disability’. Each new term replaced the previous one; ‘mental deficiency’ became ‘mental handicap’, subsequently ‘mental handicap’ became ‘intellectual disability’. This thesis applied a Foucauldian Discourse analysis to the history of Irish Education to expose the hidden conditions that underpinned the aforementioned concepts, in order to answer the following questions: What factors brought a particular conceptual configuration in the classification of intellectual disability into play in the first instance? What made that configuration seem plausible and socially desirable? What changes or events happened that caused the conceptual configuration to be replaced? And did these changes cultivate marginalisation or demarginalisation? The first part of the analysis divided the history of Irish education into three different epistémè and labelled them, the Institution, the Birth of Special Education and the Birth of Social Inclusion. Foucauldian tools of analysis were applied to allow for the surfaces of emergence to be exposed and identified; thus, in turn revealing the frameworks of knowledge that were hidden underneath. In this webinar Eleanor discussed how the discourse analysis was applied and the main findings of the research.