After Optimism? Ireland, Racism and Globalisation
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After Optimism? Ireland, Racism and Globalisation Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh Contents Acknowledgments Foreword by Fintan O’Toole i 1. After Optimism? The Specificities of State Racism in 21st 1 Century Ireland 2. The Coalition of the Willing: Racism, Globalisation and the 21 Irish State 3. Global mobilities I: Citizenship, Immigration and Asylum in 36 21st Century Ireland 4. Global mobilities II: Migrant labour, the ‘Celtic Tiger’ and 58 the Politics of Immigration Control 5. Policing ‘Constitutional Racism’ 77 6. ‘Black Bodies’ and ‘Headless Hookers’: Women and 97 Alternative Narratives of Globalisation 7. ‘Ever and always alien': From Jewish refugees to Swastikas 112 on the Museum Wall 8. Anti-Travellerism: Towards a ‘final solution’ to the Traveller 127 ‘problem’ 9. Racial Statelet? Northern Ireland becomes the ‘Race Hate 145 Capital of Europe’ 10. Racism without Racism: Irish anti-racism and its Discontents 164 References 188 Index 205 Acknowledgements We would like to firstly thank our publisher, Chinedu Onyejelem of Metro Éireann. We also thank Fintan O’Toole for his generous foreword. Thanks are also extended to David Landy and Catherine Reilly for their editorial work, and to Tanya Ward, Elaine Moriarty and Christine Bell for their helpful comments on chapter drafts. Dedication We would like to dedicate the book to all those Irish children who find themselves in a new limbo, remaining ‘part of the nation’ while being denied Irish citizenship. The Proclamation of 1916 promised to ‘cherish all of the children of the nation equally’. The ‘birthright’ of all Irish-born children is still protected without shame or irony by Bunreacht na hÉireann and the Good Friday Agreement yet this has been rendered effectively valueless by the Citizenship Referendum and subsequent legislation. The Irish state was able to strip some of its most vulnerable children of citizenship with the support of 80 per cent of the population. This reality is at the very core of the racism that we confront in 21st century Ireland. Foreword Fintan O’Toole n the last months of 2005 and the early months of 2006, the Irish State as a whole responded magnificently to the plight of illegal migrants. While other Igovernments were taking a hard line, insisting that immigration laws had to be applied with unbending rigour, the Irish Government reacted with passion and compassion. The unity of purpose was impressive. In October 2005, both houses of the Oireachtas passed unanimously a resolution expressing deep concern for illegal migrants, acknowledging their great contribution to society, the pointless cruelty of laws that cut them off from their families back home, and the urgent need to give them a proper status. The issue, according the responsible minister constituted ‘the highest priority for the Government’. He empathised with ‘the stress and strain of the daily lives of all of those caught in this difficult situation’. He promised that the Government, in all its dealings with those in power, would do all it could ‘to emphasise the absolute importance of addressing the vulnerable situation of the undocumented, in a sensitive and sympathetic way.’ The undocumented migrants in question are, of course, Irish-born people living in the United States. Their plight, which is real and difficult, is instinctively understood at all levels of the Irish political system. The debates in the Dáil and Seanad on the joint resolution supporting the Kennedy/McCain bill in the US Senate, which aims to give the undocumented Irish a mechanism through which they could regularise their status, were unusual for the numbers of backbenchers who made impassioned speeches. Most of them could cite personal experiences of families in their own constituencies who had suffered because of the inability of their loved ones to come home for funerals or weddings. Senior ministers, including the Taoiseach and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, directly lobbied George W. Bush and his cabinet on the issue. The issue was covered comprehensively and sympathetically in the Irish print and broadcast media. Three things are worth noting about this Government campaign. One, of course, is its startling hypocrisy. Throughout all of this period, the Government continued to deport ‘failed’ asylum seekers from Ireland. It continued to use its discretion to grant Leave to Remain as narrowly and grudgingly as possible. It continued to make family re-unification for those who have the right to remain In Ireland as difficult as possible. What Noel Treacy, the Minister of State with responsibility for emigrants, calls ‘the stress and strain of the daily lives of all of those caught in this difficult situation’ is felt, apparently, by Irish migrants in the US but not by, say, Nigerian migrants in Ireland. The underlying assumption -- that ‘we’ feel pain but that ‘they’ do not -- is implicitly racist. It suggests a hierarchy of human feeling, in which ‘we’ are at the top and ‘they’ are at the bottom. The second noteworthy aspect of the campaign is that it is implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, exclusive. The appeal is not for undocumented migrants in the United States to be given a proper status. It is for Irish undocumented migrants in the US to be given a proper status. Many of the Irish groups in the US itself who have campaigned on the issue have understood the logic of their own arguments ii Foreword and supported similar campaigns by Hispanic migrants. Billy Lawless, chairman of Chicago Celts for Immigration Reform, was quoted in The Chicago Sun-Times of March 9 2006 as saying ‘It's not just a Mexican or Hispanic thing. We're all in the same boat.’ But the Government’s campaign has scrupulously avoided making such a universal case. The core of its appeal is that Irishness confers a special status. That appeal, with the implicit understanding that the people we’re talking about are, after all, a relatively small elite of white Europeans, and not the brown- skinned horde from the south, strikes a chord. As the Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern told the Dáil in October 2005, he and the Taoiseach had found in discussions that ‘President Bush and the American Administration… portrayed a complete understanding of the issues and a very sympathetic attitude towards the Irish involved, given the relatively small numbers.’ The relative prominence in the US of the issue of Irish illegals compared to that of the vastly greater number of Mexican illegals (and the hugely different tone of most of the media coverage) is itself determined by racist assumptions. The Government’s campaign exploits those assumptions. The third point worth making is that the rhetoric around the issue in Irish politics takes for granted the notion that Ireland has a special place in the arena of American-led globalisation. The imagined relationship between the US and Ireland is that of partners in a mutually profitable deal. We built America, we love America, so why can’t America do us a favour? There is an implied contrast in which the other (bad) migrants may be parasites, battening onto America’s riches, but our (good) migrants are hard-working net contributors to the wealth of the US. The Fine Gael TD, addressing the issue in the Dáil on February 15 2006, expressed outrage at the fact that the US was letting Australians (those sun-worshipping, beer-guzzling hedonists) into the country: ‘We are supposed to have a special relationship with the US Government. How could the same Government allocate 10,500 visas to Australian citizens in recent months? What did the Australian people ever do for America?’ The Government itself does not go quite this far, but it, too, plays up the suggestion that the Irish are good migrants (with the silent aside ‘Not like some people we could name’). As Noel Treacy put it: ‘Our interest in this matter is set against the background of the deep affection of Irish People for the United States of America, and our great pride in the contribution, which Irish People have made, and continue to make, to developments in that country, down through the generations.’ This whole episode thus embodies some of the issues that Ronit Lentin and Robbie McVeigh illuminate in this important book: the structural nature of racial discourse, the rapid evolution of Ireland into a globalised state, the reality of racism as a ‘world phenomenon’, the connection between immigration policy and Ireland’s tacit support for the invasion of Iraq. The apparently radical discontinuity between the rhetoric of the Irish State around the issue of Irish illegal migrants in the US on the one hand and the actions of the Irish State in relation to illegal migrants in Ireland largely vanishes when racial assumptions are taken into the equation. Those assumptions are all the more powerful for being tacit and, indeed, largely invisible to those who use them. They are embedded in the kind of dual Fintan O’Toole iii self-image that emerges in the overlap between the Ireland that supports the ‘undocumented community’ (a phrase used by the Government in its campaign) in the United States and the Ireland that deports ‘failed’ asylum seekers and imprisons people for having the wrong documents. This double vision is a function precisely of the kind of mentality in which, to quote Lentin and McVeigh, ‘people become “illegal” not for what they do but for who they are.’ What makes this book so bracing is the way it challenges, not just the State, but the general drift of anti-racism. Anti-racism tends to reproduce the dualities it opposes. Just as the structural racism of the State divides migrants into good people and bad people, depending on their origin and/or usefulness to the economy at any particular moment, so anti-racism has its own ‘us’ and ‘them’ -- we are good, compassionate people; they are evil, narrow-minded bigots.