The context and nature of education research in Ireland has shifted significantly over the past twenty-five years or so. In ways, this reflects deep and ongoing reform of practises and principles in Irish education and indeed education globally. From a period of little policy action in the early 1980s to significant reform through to this second decade of the 21^st century, Ireland has seen an unprecedented policy mobilisation around education and educating including the initiation of ongoing ‘modernization’ process, the adoption (and discarding) of social partnerships for education, and increasing international influences in the form of supranational interests such as the EU and OECD. In a number of ways, new research spaces that has been constructed in, around, and through this changing discourse on education, governance, and regulation; these include questions of equity, curriculum and assessment, and teachers’ professional standing. Irish education research addresses these and other related issues by focusing particularly on the changed dynamics of our education spaces and on the ideology that now seeks to dominate there.