Ronit Lentin. 2007. ‘Ireland: Racial state and crisis racism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2007, vol.
30/4, pp. 61-27.
Ireland: Racial state and crisis racism 1
Abstract
This article theorises the state as central to the construction of racism in the Republic of
Ireland, which, since the 1990s economic boom, has become an in-migration destination.
State racism culminated in the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, in which, at a majority of four
to one, the Irish electorate voted for the removal of birth right citizenship to children of
migrants. Based on Goldberg’s theory of the racial state, which, in constructing
homogeneity, obscures existing heterogeneities, and on Foucault’s theory of biopolitics,
leading to the state supposedly caring for the population through a series of technologies
aiming to regulate and manage racial diversities, the article examines recent developments in
Ireland’s immigration and asylum policies. The debates around the Citizenship Referendum
are theorized as constructing what Balibar terms ‘crisis racism’, blaming migrants for the
problems of the system.
Key words: Ireland, racial state, biopolitics, citizenship referendum
Introduction
On 11 June 2004 the government of the Republic of Ireland asked the electorate to vote in a
referendum to amend article 9 of the Constitution to remove birth-right citizenship from
children born in Ireland who do not have at least one parent who is an Irish citizen or who is
entitled to Irish citizenship. Birth right citizenship was in existence since the establishment of
the Republic of Ireland in 1922. The amendment did not include the children of the 1.8
million holders of Irish passports not born in Ireland who have one Irish grandparent and
who are therefore entitled to Irish citizenship without having to set foot in Ireland. 79.8 per
cent of the electorate voted in favour of the government’s proposal.
While global factors impinging on migration are increasingly discussed in relation to
the coupling of migration with discourses of ‘security’ and ‘the war on/of terror’, I contend
that the nation state, theorized by David Theo Goldberg (2002) as a ‘racial state’, remains the
focus of any analysis of racism, viewed by Foucault as ‘inscribed as the basic mechanism of
power, as it is exercised in modern States’. Foucault argues that ‘the modern State can
scarcely function without becoming involved with racism at some point’ (Foucault 2003:
254).
I view racism as ‘a political system aiming to regulate bodies’ (Hesse 2001), rather
than the consequence of individual prejudice (even though individual citizens voted in favour
of the Citizenship Referendum). Thus, racism is understood as involving state, rather than
individual or societal formations. 2 Without suggesting Ireland as an ideal type ‘racial state’,
this article employs social theory and media discourses to argue that Ireland has evolved
from being, like other nation-states, a ‘racial state’ – in which ‘race’ and ‘nation’ are defined
in terms of each other – evident, for instance, in the ethnically narrow framing of the
Constitution of Ireland (Lentin 1998) – to a racist state, where governmental ‘biopolitics’ and
technologies of racialising indigenous groups and regulating immigration and asylum dictate
the discursive and practical construction of Irishness’s otherness. This argument is explicated
through an examination of the controversy surrounding Irish citizen children whose parents
are migrants, and the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, which, this article argues, is a turning
point in the recent history of racism in Ireland.
I want to argue that racial terminology of categorization and control on the one hand
and discourses of ‘cultural diversity’ on the other underpin the Irish state’s response to the
arrival of growing numbers of immigrants since the 1990s, in the shape of ‘intercultural’
politics, which construct cultural difference and ethnic minority ‘communities’ as static and
already there, ignoring intra-ethnic heterogeneities and contestations. Racial state thinking in
Ireland has spawned state-generated euphemisms such as ‘non-nationals’ to describe non-EU
migrants (replacing the no-longer-acceptable ‘aliens’ as in the British-inspired 1935 Aliens
Act), and ‘Irish born children’ to describe the children citizen of non-EU migrants.
2
Furthermore, I want to suggest that state asylum, immigration and integration policies –
couched in terms such as ‘management’, ‘regulation’ and ‘mainstreaming’, approximate
Foucault’s theorization of the modern nation-state as a ‘state of population’, monitoring and
controlling the nation’s biological life which becomes a problem of sovereign power
(Agamben 1998, p. 10). This article highlights the apparent contradiction between a declared
(bio)politics of ‘a caring society’, and the increasing tendency to re-define the nation-state’s
boundaries by controlling not only in-migration, but also existing minority collectives within.
Racial state
Goldberg (2002) posits modern nation-states as ‘racial states’, which exclude in order to
construct homogeneity – which he sees as ‘heterogeneity in denial’ – while appropriating
difference through celebrations of the multicultural. The racial state is a state of power,
asserting its control over those within the state and excluding others from outside the state.
Through constitutions, border controls, the law, policy making, bureaucracy and
governmental technologies such as census categorizations, invented histories and traditions,
ceremonies and cultural imaginings, modern states, each in its own way, are defined by their
power to exclude (and include) in racially ordered terms, to categorize hierarchically, and to
set aside. In the modern state, race and nation are defined in terms of each other to produce a
coherent picture of the population in the face of a divisive heterogeneity.
Goldberg posits two traditions of thinking about racial states. The first, naturalism,
fixes racially conceived ‘natives’ as premodern, naturally incapable of progress. The second
tradition, historicism, elevates Europeans over primitive or underdeveloped others as a
victory of progress (Goldberg 2002, p. 43).
The modern state is about keeping racialized others out but also about legislating
against the so-called ‘degeneracy’ of indigenous populations (which explains the persistence
of antisemitism and anti-nomadism). For the racial naturalist, the racially subjugated are
surplus labour, exploited at best, detritus at worst. For the racial historicist, the racially
immature are inserted into historical development, though progress is only possible through
mimicry of the Eurocentre (Goldberg 2002, p. 94-6). While the two traditions overlap,
historicism has become dominant since the twentieth century. Understood as the space of
white men of property,
3
the modern state’s historicist progressivism aims, through
amalgamation and assimilation, to assist its racial others – conceived as not white – to ‘undo
their uncivilized conditions’. But beneath its liberalism, historicism camouflages racism, and
is ultimately about the ordering zeal of modernity (Goldberg 2002, pp. 80, 92-3).
Contrary to the accepted narrative of Ireland as a former ‘emigrant nursery’ and of
in-migration as a ‘new’ phenomenon, Ireland has long been a country of both emigration and
immigration. Alongside Scots and English migrants came substantial other in-migrations
3
including Huguenots, Italian, Chinese, German, Jews and others (Ward 1999). British
imperial colonial government created a context in which emigration was routine – the vast
majority of Irish migrants went to British colonies or former colonies. As elsewhere, slavery,
starvation and bonded servitude encouraged huge movement outwards throughout the
nineteenth century (Lentin and McVeigh 2002, 2006). This out-migration created a huge
Irish diaspora, totalling some 75 million around the world, with around 45 million people in
the United States claiming Irish ancestry. An estimated three million Irish citizens currently
live abroad, of whom 1.2 million were born in Ireland, mostly in the US and the UK
(Department of Foreign Affairs, cited by Ruhs 2005, p. 7).
The 1990s advent of the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom (Allen 2000; Kirby
2002) transformed the situation where emigration outstripped in-migration into Ireland.
While many in-migrants were returning Irish citizens, driven by the ‘success’ of capitalism
in Ireland, Irishness became racialized in new ways (c.f. McVeigh 1996; Fanning 2002;
Loyal 2003; Mac Éinri, 2003Lentin and McVeigh 2006). To borrow from Ignatiev’s book
How the Irish Became White (1995), for the first time the Irish in Ireland became ‘white’,
and Irishness became equated with whiteness precisely when it became increasingly difficult
to make this equation. Historicism is one way of theorizing this transition as it became clear
that interpreting in-migration and the presence of people of colour as ‘new’ underpins the
elevation of Europeans and the respective racialization of non-Europeans as working towards
progress and equality with the Eurocentre.
While naturalism Irish-style is exemplified in English colonialism, from the
seventeenth century onwards, racializing the Irish, casting them as bestial, and incapable of
progress (Ní Shuinéar 2002, p. 177), Irish historicism creates its own ‘racial inferiors’
through, firstly, the ongoing racialization of Irish Travellers, conceived as ‘Irish national’
though not always as ‘white’ (McVeigh 1996); secondly, through governmental technologies
of asylum and immigration controls, aiming to restore modernity’s order just as all
certainties – economic, civil, cultural, sexual – seem to be collapsing; and thirdly, through
biopolitical governmental technologies regulating the lives of migrants, but also equality
mechanisms, which reproduce racialized populations as ultimately unequal.
Biopolitics: From racial state to racist state
Michel Foucault (2003) argues that when natural life becomes included in mechanisms of
state power, politics turns into biopolitics, the territorial state becomes a ‘state of
population’, and the nation’s biological life becomes a problem of sovereign power. Through
a series of technologies, bio-power creates ‘docile bodies’, and the population – its welfare,
wealth, longevity and health – becomes a subject, but also an object in the hands of
government.
4
Foucault uses the concept of ‘biopower’ to demonstrate how the ‘ethnicization’ of
racism shifts its focus from intra-societal degeneration to the threat posed from the outside.
Biopower is addressed to living beings and directed at all the processes that refer to the mass
of humans: birth, death, sickness, health, education, welfare, but also the gathering of
information through demography and statistics. Foucault differentiates between the
sovereign power of the old territorial state (‘to make die and let live’) and modern biopower
(‘to make live and let die’). The modern state can scarcely function without becoming
involved with racism, ‘the break between what must live and what must die’ (Foucault 2003,
p. 254). Race no longer serves one group against another, but becomes a ‘tool’ of social
conservatism; a racism that society practices against itself, a tool of constant purification and
social normalization.
As opposed to scapegoat theories of racism, which argue that under economic and
social duress, sub-populations are cordoned off as intruders, blamed, and used to deflect
anxieties, as suggested by Balibar (1991), Foucault’s theory of racism is an expression of an
ongoing social war nurtured by the biopolitical technologies of purification. Thus racism is
intrinsic to the nature of all modern, normalising states and their biological technologies,
occurring in varying intensities, ranging from social exclusion to mass murder.
I now turn to discuss biopower’s racializing technologies in the Republic of Ireland,
which, in doing all it can to maintain homogeneity by ‘managing’ ethnic diversity, is
arguably not merely ‘racial’ in its formation and use of discourses and practices such as the
law, but also ‘racist’ in terms of using biopower technologies to control, in particular though
not exclusively, migrant and racialized populations.
Racial categorization and citizenship rights
Goldberg (2002, pp. 141-7) posits the law as central to modern state formation and a
technology of racial rule, promoting racial categorization and identification, and shaping
national identities through legislating on immigration controls and citizenship rights. With
historicism, the law shapes race in legal terms, threading it into the fabric of the social. Since
the neutrality of the law is no guarantee of equal treatment, constitutions might be suspended
(or not extended) in relation to racially defined populations, as the Citizenship Referendum,
discussed below, exemplifies. I suggest that Irish historicism regards non-Irish others as
inadequate candidates for citizenship, employing patently racist legislation to criminalize,
regulate and control both in-migrants and indigenous populations, as I now illustrate under
four headings.
5
Re-categorising racialized populations
According to Gilroy (2000, p. 28), the ‘technical, anthropological language of “ethnicity”
and “culture” is just another way of speaking about “race”’. Irish Travellers, who at 23,700,
are Ireland’s largest and oldest racialized group, have fought long and hard to claim a status
as an ‘ethnic group’ even though this has only been grudgingly recognized by the Irish state
(O’Connell 2002; Lentin and McVeigh 2006). Yet on October 15 2003 the Minister for
Justice Equality and Law reform claimed that Travellers ‘do not constitute a distinct group
from the population as a whole in terms of race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin’.
This was why, he argued, ‘discrimination against Travellers’ was inserted as a ‘separate
ground’ into the Equal Status Act and the Employment Equality Act
4
– combining a
biopolitics of ‘caring’ for Travellers with their racialization. Further limiting their rights, the
2002 Housing Bill criminalizes Traveller camping on public and private property, despite the
fact that commitments to provide adequate accommodation to Travellers made by the
government in its 1995 Task Force on the Travelling Community (1995) went largely
unfulfilled.
In July 2002, the government terminated the funding for the Citizen Traveller
project.
5
The Minister for Justice stated that the campaign ‘did not achieve significant
success in its main objective – ‘healing the divide in Irish society that stands between the
settled and Traveller communities’
6
- again avowing supposed concern for Traveller
welfare, while at the same time cutting their funding. The Irish Traveller Movement
expressed anger at the suspension of the project, which was due, according to the ITM, to its
outdoor poster campaign highlighting the negative implications for Travellers of the ‘trespass
law’ and declaring the law ‘racist’ (ITM 2003).
The decision to end the funding illustrates the contradictions in the Irish state’s
approach to Ireland’s indigenous population. While the racial state deprives Travellers of
their chosen ‘ethnic’ status which would allow them to name their discrimination ‘racism’, it
does so in the pretence of caring, based on a Foucauldian ‘biopolitics’, according to which
the role of the state is to ‘manage’, and in this case, assimilate and settle the Traveller
population, but ultimately aiming to segregate them (O’Connell 2002).
Immigration and asylum controls
Even though in-migration is not ‘new’ as is often argued by state and media in Ireland, in the
1990s the newly affluent Ireland became an in-migration destination. In 1996, Ireland
reached its ‘migration turning point’ and has been a country of net in-migration ever since
(Ruhs 2005, p. 109).
7
However, despite an explicit admittance that in order to maintain
economic growth, Ireland is in need of immigrant labour, the state is doing all it can to
restrict immigration. Loyal (2003, p. 74) argues that the current hegemonic construction of
Ireland as an ‘open, cosmopolitan, multicultural, tourist friendly society’ obscures a ‘harsh
6
reality of capitalist production, exclusionary nationalism and growing xenophobia in relation
to both the state and the general populace’. The economic boom, instead of allaying racist
fears, has ‘consistently treated non-national immigration as a political problem’.
Refugee legislation has been successively amended to focus on the credibility of
applicants, mandate finger printing, make provisions for detention, and disallow applications
from countries designated as ‘safe countries’. The number of asylum applications rose from
39 in 1992 to peak at 11,634 in 2002, and has gone down ever since (Office of Refugee
Applications Commissioner 2005). While limiting the numbers of people allowed to land to
present their asylum application, the state seems desperate to bring in economic and labour
migrants, seen as economic commodities, vital to Ireland’s continued economic growth. Due
to shortage of labour in certain sectors, there was a 600 per cent rise in the number of work
visas granted since 1999 (Mac Éinri 2003; Bacik 2004a, p. 190). Between March 2004 and
March 2005, the Central Statistics Office recorded an increase of 72,400 workers, including
25,000 migrant workers (O’Halloran 2005). Despite this, Ireland has developed neither a
coherent immigration policy nor a green card system (Loyal and Allen 2006).
Before the enactment of the 2000 Illegal Immigration Act, the Minister for Justice’s
power to deport non-nationals was based on the 1935 Aliens Act and the 1946 Aliens Order,
rendered ‘beyond the scope’ only in 1999 with the enactment of the Immigration Act, which
shifts the focus from identifying persons in need of protection, ‘towards techniques devised
to screen out as many applications as possible’ (Irish Refugee Council 2003, emphasis
added). This has resulted in increasing numbers of deportations: in all, since 1999 a total of
2,004 people were deported from Ireland, and 2,299 were ‘voluntarily repatriated’ by July
2004 (Irish Refugee Council 2004; see Feckete 2005 for a European context).
In March 2005, 35 people described by the state as ‘failed asylum seekers’ were
deported to Nigeria. Popular mobilization on behalf of the deportees ended in the return of
one ‘aged out’ 8 young Nigerian, Olukunle Eluhanla, who was due to sit his final state exams
(Healy 2005). Rationalizing his initial refusal to return Eluhanla, later reversed, Minister of
Justice Michael McDowell stated that if he was to act on the ‘length of petitions’, the fact
that some deportees were academically gifted, or the fact that they had become involved in
local community groups, ‘I would have a totally chaotic deportation system’ (Reid 2005).
The deportation system clearly assumes greater importance than the refugees’ safety.
State discourses demonstrate the demonization of those who seek refugee status as
‘bogus refugees’, ‘economic migrants’, ‘illegal immigrants’ or simply ‘failed asylum
seekers’, linking them to criminality and breaches of state security (Schuster 2003). Asylum
seekers are presented as costing the state too much and as competing with disadvantaged
populations for scarce resources, and, crucially, the need to control them is presented as
essential to the ‘common good’ and subordinated to ‘the integrity of the asylum process’.
Schuster (2003, p. 253) argues that the reason for continuing deportations, despite the fact
7
that they are expensive in both financial and human terms, 9 is that they are both ineffectual
and essential, confirming the lie that states can control their boundaries and ‘remove from
their territory those without any right to remain’, which is necessary to ‘assuage public
opinion, which would not view the state’s incapacity in this area with equanimity’. However,
the assumption that the threat of deportation creates fear and may persuade some to return
‘voluntarily’ is only speculative.
Eithne Luibhéid (2004, pp. 335-350), contextualising the arrival of asylum seekers to
Ireland in global restructuring, global capital accumulation, and global wars, argues that
racial states need asylum seekers in order to ‘redraw racial and national boundaries that have
become destabilized in the contemporary era’.
According to Ivana Bacik, the Supreme Court’s response to legal challenges of the
Immigration Act was to rule against the argument on discrimination. In doing so, the law
differentiates not only between citizens and ‘non nationals’, but also between categories of
‘non nationals’, upholding the legitimacy of public policy which ‘facilitates the better
administration of the asylum system’ (Bacik 2004a, p. 187), an argument used repeatedly, as
I now demonstrate in relation to the citizen children affair and the Citizenship Referendum.
The ‘Irish-born children’ debate
Just as Travellers were no longer recognized by the Minister for Justice as an ‘ethnic group’,
so too children born in Ireland to non-citizen parents were assigned a new category, that of
‘Irish born children’, racially differentiated from children born in Ireland to citizen parents.
The relationship between the Irish state and migrant parents of citizen children illustrates the
use of the law in racializing migrant populations.
Until the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, all children born in Ireland were Irish
citizens, with Irish citizenship constitutionally granted to anyone who was a citizen of the
Irish Free State before the enactment of the 1937 constitution. The 1956 and 1986
Nationality and Citizenship Acts grant citizenship to anyone born in the 32 counties of
Ireland, except ‘children of aliens entitled to diplomatic immunity in the State at the time of
birth’. This right was further consolidated by the amended Article 2 of the Irish Constitution,
as part of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement:
It is the entitlement and birthright of every person born in the island of Ireland,
which includes its islands and seas, to be part of the Irish nation. That is also the
entitlement of all persons otherwise qualified in accordance with law to be citizens
of Ireland. Furthermore, the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of
Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage (Bunreacht
na hEireann 1937, 9th Amendment 1998).
What was new about the amended Article 2 of the Constitution is the explicit
entitlement of all people born on the island of Ireland to membership of ‘the nation’, a
8
nebulous entity. Dubbed by the state a ‘constitutional loophole’, the amendment meant, as
was ruled in the 1989 Fajujonu Supreme Court case, that migrant parents of children born in
Ireland had a claim to remain in Ireland to provide ‘care and company’ to their citizen child.
This process of application for permission to remain was overturned in January 2003 when
the Supreme Court ruled in the Lobe and Osayande appeal, that ‘non-national’ parents no
longer had a strong case to be allowed to remain in Ireland to bring up their child (Madock
and Mallon 2003). The Lobe and Osayande case involved two families, of Czech Roma and
Nigerian origins, against whom deportation orders were made. In both cases, the parents
claimed that their decision to remain resident was in the children’s best interest. The
Supreme Court, however, privileged the State’s right to deport, and the ‘integrity of the
asylum process’ over these citizen children’s rights, although it did not rescind the
citizenship right of persons born in the island of Ireland (CADIC 2003).
The debates following the January 2003 Supreme Court ruling exposed a host of
contradictions. One contradiction is between nationality and citizenship. The ius sanguinisbased rights to Irish citizenship allows up to third generation Irish emigrants to claim Irish
citizenship, while at the same time, the state is contesting the ius solis citizenship rights of
children of migrants, which, it claimed misleadingly, was only accorded to children of
migrants by the insertion of Article 2 into the Constitution in 1998. The other contradiction is
between two constitutional entities, ‘the nation’ (consolidated by the amendment to Article
2) and ‘the family’, termed in Article 41.1.1 of the Constitution as ‘the natural primary and
fundamental unit group of Society’ (Bunreacht na hÉireann 1937). The judgment juxtaposed
the ‘integrity of the asylum process’ – interpreted by the court as the right of the Minister for
Justice to deport – and the constitutional integrity of ‘the family’.
10
The court’s ruling in the L & O case (Maddock and Mallon 2003; Coulter 2003)
illustrates the centrality of the law as a governmental technology deployed by the racial state.
Clearly upholding ‘control in the face of the anarchic, of order in the face of disorder’
(Goldberg 2002, p. 94), Chief Justice Ronan Keane ruled that the State ‘was entitled to take
the view that the orderly system of dealing with immigration and asylum applications should
not be undermined by persons seeking to take advantage’ of the system. According to
Mullaly (2003), this case proves that ‘the protection of a child’s claim to reside within a State
(is) made dependent on the legal status and behaviour of her or his parents… in place of a
concern with the child’s best interests, the State substitutes its own interest in immigration
control’. Furthermore, this contradiction between the ‘common good’ and the exclusion of
those termed by the state as being outside the remit of full Irish citizenship illustrates
Foucault’s insistence that racism is a defence mechanism exercised by society against itself.
In the wake of the ruling, on 19 February 2003, the Minister of Justice removed the
process whereby an immigrant parent could apply for permission to remain in Ireland solely
on the grounds of being the parent of a child citizen (CADIC, 2003). The abolition of the
9
process resulted in 11,500 migrant parents of Irish citizen children becoming candidates for
deportation as of July 2003.
For a period of almost two years, the Minister for Justice consistently reiterated his
unwillingness to entertain any policy recognising en masse migrant parents of Irish children
who had lawfully applied for residency. Moreover, among the 341 people deported between
2002 and February 2005 there were at least 20 citizen children (Dáil Question, 16 February
2005). However, the Minister insisted that these figures were ‘infinitesimal’ compared to
what was by 2004 16,000 non-national parents of Irish citizen children and said these figures
‘give the lie to the suggestion that I am busily deporting these people on a wholesale basis’
(O’Halloran 2004).
However, rhetoric aside, just a few months after the state won the Citizenship
Referendum, the decision was reversed and on 15 January 2005 the DJELR announced the
details of the new administrative arrangements for parents of Irish children born before 1
January 2005 to apply for residency in Ireland. By July 2005 some 18,000 people applied for
residency, even though they were made to sign away any rights for family reunification;
16,693 applicants were granted residency (Onyejelem 2005 p. 16).
I would argue that this volte face had probably more to do with the huge cost of
potential court cases by migrant parents than with humanitarian reasons, though the Minister
did not explain this reversal of fortunes.
The citizenship referendum
Having (as it transpired, temporarily) closed the route of residency to migrant parents of
citizen children, the Irish state next held a referendum to reverse its ius solis citizenship
access and, for the first time in 83 years, make blood the cornerstone of Irish citizenship.
The state’s main message – couched in discourses of ‘citizenship matters’, ‘common
sense’ and ‘the integrity of Irish citizenship’– was that Ireland’s citizenship laws, unique in
the EU, were being exploited. However, although much was made of Ireland’s unique
citizenship arrangements within the EU, Colin Harvey (2003) links state sovereignty to the
insistence by states on determining who is entitled to enter their territory and become a
citizen, to argue that immigration (and refugee) law, with its focus on the award of a status,
leaves too much to the (racial) state to decide. The purpose is always to ‘secure national level
protection’ (Harvey 2003, p. 17), which puts paid to the argument in the run up to the
Citizenship Referendum, about the need to harmonise Ireland’s so-called generosity with
citizenship standards of other EU member states.
Throughout the debate, the Minister for Justice was keen to emphasise that the
proposed change was antiracist, rather than racist, and that ‘the greatest contribution to
racism and xenophobia would be if it was perceived that the Government could not control
immigration’. Despite the Supreme Court ruling regarding migrant parents of citizen
10
children, the Minister said ‘it became clear that citizenship was still acting as a pull’ (Coulter
2004b). The government also used the case brought by Mrs Chen, a wealthy Chinese
national residing in the UK who chose to have her baby in Northern Ireland, winning a
European Court recommendation to be allowed to reside in Britain having had an Irish
citizen child, as further justification for the need to defend Irish citizenship from abuse
(Bacik 2004b; Coulter and Brennock 2004). However, in Mrs Chen’s case there were no
resource implications for the Irish State, but rather for the northern Irish state, paid for by the
British exchequer, so it is plausible to argue the Irish racist state was born out of a perceived
obligation by the Irish Republic towards the integrity of racist immigration and citizenship
policies in Britain and the EU. 11
Bacik argues that immigration law in Ireland leaves too much in the hands of
ministers, without sufficient intervention from the legislature, thus breaching the separation
of powers, vital for democracy. Legislation on immigration matters is regularly passed
hurriedly in response to individual cases and crisis situations (Bacik 2004a pp. 192-4).
However, despite, or perhaps because of, the inequality the referendum created between
children born in Ireland who will all remain part of ‘the nation’ – article 2 was not amended
– yet some of whom will have neither Irish ‘nationality’ nor ‘citizenship’, the referendum
was carried by a majority of four to one, demonstrating that the racial state’s ‘common
sense’ argument did influence Irish voters.
Crisis racism: Migrants as ‘problem’
Balibar links racism with long standing social structures and problems, all ‘an integral part of
what is called national identity’ (Balibar 1991, p. 217). Viewing immigration as a ‘problem’
and linking every social problem – employment, accommodation, social security, schooling,
health services, morals or criminality – to the presence of ‘immigrants’ serves to spread the
idea that reducting (or ending) immigration (and the expulsion of as many immigrants as
possible) would solve ‘our’ social problems.
Throughout the referendum debate, migrant mothers were positioned as deliberately
having babies in Ireland to gain Irish citizenship for their children and residency rights for
themselves and their spouses. At the start of the debate, it was alleged that a ‘baby boom is
already putting many of the nation’s (sic) maternity hospitals under strain’ and that ‘births in
Ireland have grown by almost 6,000 from 54,789 in 2000’ (McSweeney 2003). This was
despite the fact that the Department of Health’s Health Statistics figures show that births per
1,000 of the Irish population grew from 15.0 in 1991 to only 15.1 in 2001 and the total
fertility rate actually fell from 2.09 in 1991 to 1.98 in 2001 (cited in King 2004 p. 10). Dervla
King (2004) argues that no statistics were provided to vindicate the state’s claim about large
numbers of non-EU nationals coming to Ireland solely to give birth; and that no data were
11
available from the three Dublin maternity hospitals relating to the residency status of women
who presented for delivery; and that it was not possible to definitively identify the number of
women who have arrived in the country shortly before giving birth.
Despite the heterogeneity of immigrants into Ireland (returning Irish emigrants, EU
nationals, labour migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, students and spouses of non-EU
nationals), the alleged ‘baby boom’ was attributed by politicians and media citing the
‘masters’ of Dublin’s maternity hospitals to ‘the significant number of refugees and asylum
seekers delivering in the hospitals’ (Donnellan 2003a). The rhetoric of ‘flooding’ and
‘pushing the system to the brink’ was used by state actors to justify the continuation of the
state’s intent (stated in the 2002 Programme for Government, Department of the Taoiseach
2002) to deport all migrant parents of Irish children citizens. Yet, although an examination of
media articles relating to Dublin’s maternity hospitals reveals that migrant mothers were
only one of the system’s concerns, some media reports have over-dramatised the ‘assault’ by
migrant mothers on Dublin’s maternity hospitals (e.g., O’Doherty 2003).
While state actors argued that migrant mothers were allegedly arriving in Ireland
without booking or at the last stages of their pregnancies, King shows that the total figure of
births to non-EU nationals in the three Dublin maternity hospitals who did not book or were
late arrivals in 2003 was 548 (or just under 2.4 per cent of the total number of births at the
three Dublin maternity hospitals) (King 2004, pp. 14-16). 12
Despite the statement by the Minister for Justice that he was ‘anecdotally’ aware of
women, ‘who have come here on holiday visas, give birth, collect the birth certificate and the
passport for the child and returned home’ (Minister McDowell, Dáil Debate, April 21, 2004,
cited by King 2004, p. 7), maternity hospital spokespersons were saying that migrant
mothers continued to use Dublin maternity services even after the abolition in February 2003
of the procedure whereby non-EU parents of Irish children could apply for residency
(Dundon 2003). Such comments were termed by the Irish Refugee Council as ‘the worst
form of scapegoating… The health service has its own problem, without blaming its troubles
on immigrants’ (McSweeney 2003).
Balibar argued already in 1991 that ‘immigration’ had become the name of race, a
new name, but one that is linked to historical appellations and that enables individuals to be
classified in a racist typology (Balibar 1991, p. 222). Should we therefore keep quiet about
racism, as suggested by Ireland’s Justice Minister, who consistently claims that ‘Ireland is
not a racist country’ (Metro Eireann 2004), or should we ‘suppress the cause of racism, lest
we prove unable to control its effects, for which, read: send home the “foreign bodies” whose
presence gives rise to “reactions of rejection”’, while being prepared to ‘assimilate all those
who are assimilable by their nature or their aspirations’ (Balibar 1991, p. 218).
Constituting migrants as a ‘problem’ – by successively calling asylum seekers
‘bogus refugees’, ‘economic migrants’ and ‘illegal immigrants’ – is leading to what Balibar
12
calls ‘crisis racism’ in contemporary Ireland, where the state repeatedly refuses to admit that
its punitive migration policies lead to racism.
Conclusion: Integration, citizenship, racelessness
This article argues that the leading actor in creating anti-immigrant sentiment in Ireland has
been the state, which as argued by Loyal and Allen (2006) and Lentin and McVeigh (2006),
favours labour migrants, while racializing all other migrants (though see O’Connell 2003,
2005). I want to conclude by arguing that the future of racism in Ireland is the present and
that Ireland seems to have no need for an extreme right wing nationalist party, since
‘common sense’ racism, disguised as a biopolitics of care for racialized populations, while
protecting ‘the integrity of (Irish) citizenship’, has become state policy, where the
government’s National Antiracism Plan is titled ‘Planning for Diversity’ (2005), speaking of
both racism and diversity in the future tense.
Based on a ‘politics of recognition’ style multiculturalism (see Taylor 1994; and
Hesse 1999; Lentin 2002 and A. Lentin 2006 for useful critiques), assimilationism is
unproblematically termed ‘integration’ by Irish state agencies implementing policies of
multiculturalism (re-dubbed ‘interculturalism’ in the Irish context). While officially
condemning racism, the everyday experience of racism is kept out of the debate. In
constructing immigrants and asylum seekers as both ‘new’ and a ‘problem’, the state reconceptualizes ‘the nation’ not only as homogeneous, but also as ‘invaded’ by ‘floods’ of
refugees, and as arguably ‘porous’.
If ‘citizenship matters’, as the government’s Citizenship Referendum argumentation
stressed, then the sharp distinction between citizens and non-citizens in Ireland – already
enshrined in Articles 40-45 of the Constitution, which guarantee the fundamental rights of
‘all citizens, as human persons, (to) be held equal before the law’ – has never been made
more explicit than in the post Citizenship Referendum era.
Notes
1
Thanks to Elaine Moriarty for her helpful comments on a previous version of this article.
Although several studies have recorded racist prejudice in Ireland, see Garner 2004, pp. 59-66.
3
See Mann (1997) on the racial and gendered configuration of ‘we the people’ of the US
constitution, and Lentin (1998) for a discussion of the racial, sedentary and gendered nature of the
Constitution of Ireland.
4
www.iregov.ie/oireachtas/frame.htm, Dáil Debates, Written Answers, Minister for Justice,
Equality and Law Reform, to Mr Wall, TD, 15 October 2003.
5
The Traveller Communication Committee, subsequently renamed Citizen Traveller, was charged
in May 1999 with implementing a communications initiative to promote the visibility and
participation of Travellers within Irish society, to nurture the development of Traveller pride and
self confidence, and to give Travellers a sense of community identity that could be expressed
internally and externally. The programme to achieve these objectives includes market research,
13
2
direct marketing, advertising and public relations. It was to take place over three years
(www.itmtrav.com/citizentrav).
6
Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform press release: ‘McDowell published report on
Citizen Traveller Campaign’, (www.justice.ie), 4 November 2002.
7
According to the Central Statistics Office (CSO), between 1995 and 2004 there were some
489,000 immigrants to Ireland (Ruhs 2005, p. 109). By 2006, according to the census, inmigration accounted for ten per cent of the population, or 400,000 people, up from 222,000,
or 6.8 per cent, recorded in the 2002 census (O’Brien 2006).
8
The term used by the Irish state to describe unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Ireland
when they reach 18, and are no longer entitled to residency.
9
Deportations are indeed costly; in May 2005 the Minister for Justice, responding to a Dáil question,
admitted spending €50,200 to deport one person in 2004. In all €1,628,201 has been spent since
January 2002 to charter 13 planes to deport 376 people. This cost did not include Garda overtime
(Holland 2005).
10
Which, however, according to William Binchy, was never intended to have an exclusive ‘birth
connection with Ireland’ (Binchy 2003)
11
I am grateful to Robbie McVeigh for this comment.
12
King stresses that since residency status ‘is not comprehensively recorded by the maternity
hospitals, it is not possible to draw the conclusion that all of these women had recently arrived in
Ireland’. For example, of the 239 patients who arrived unbooked or within ten days of delivering in
2003 at the National Maternity Hospital, 52.7 per cent came from Africa, but a staggering 27.2 per
cent were Irish (King 2004, pp. 14-16).
14
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Ronit Lentin is director of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Department of Sociology, Trinity
College Dublin. Her books include Conversations with Palestinian Women (1982), Gender and
Catastrophe (1997), Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence
(2000), (Re)searching Women: Feminist Research Methodologies in the Social Sciences in Ireland
(with Anne Byrne, 2000), Racism and Anti-racism in Ireland (with Robbie McVeigh, 2002), Women
and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation
(with Nahla Abdo 2002), Re-presenting the Shoah for the 21st Century (2004), Representing Migrant
Women in Ireland and the EU (with Eithne Luibhéid 2004), After Optimism? Globalisation and
Racism in 21st Century Ireland (with Robbie McVeigh 2006), and Race and State (with Alana Lentin
2006).
19