How the Irish became more than white: mixed-race Irishness in historical and contemporary contexts

ABSTRACT

Mixed-race people can be caught in a web of stereotypes – being pathologised as tragically ‘mixed up’ or heralded as the precursors of a ‘rainbow nation’. Many of these stereotypes have come primarily from research and popular cultural images in the US and the UK. Recently, within Critical Mixed-Race Studies, there is a call to study mixed-race people outside of these stereotypes, particularly those living outside the US and UK. Ireland is a unique place to look at mixed-race experiences. As a post-colonial nation within Europe with a strongly racialised past (non-white to white) and a global history of emigration, Ireland is actively grappling with contemporary rapid migration and racial/ethnic change from the 2000s to today and is now possibly becoming less white. This paper examines the historical and contemporary contexts of being mixed-race in Ireland to analyse the potential political and social meanings of mixed-race Irishness today. It begins with a demographic snapshot of racial/ethnic changes in Ireland and examines the role of symbolic representations of mixed-race in Ireland. Through indicative qualitative interviews, it concludes with some tentative ideas about how understandings of mixed-race may be shifting within Ireland today.

KEYWORDS:

• Mixed-race
• Ireland
• critical mixed-race studies
• Irish

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In July 2000, Mary Harney, the Irish Enterprise Minister, addressed the American Bar Association, famously saying, ‘Geographically, we are closer to Berlin than Boston. Spiritually, we are probably a lot closer to Boston than Berlin’ (see White 2011).

2 This is not to imply that race is biological, instead race is defined by Cornell and Hartmann (2007) as ‘ … a human group defined by itself or others as distinct by virtue of perceived common physical characteristics … ’ (Cornell and Hartmann 2007, 25); however, the perception of those physical differences is socially constructed.

3 There is no historical evidence to show that multi-ethnic children faced the same plight, or even that there were many multi-ethnic children as most of the testimonials thus far are from black/white mixed-race children in the homes.

4 The Census has not disaggregated or analysed the ‘other’ category so there is no way to tell how much of this category is people who identify as ‘other’ and how much is ‘mixed’. There also has been no qualitative analysis of the ‘write in description’ data.

5 A documentary about Phil Lynott entitled, Phil Lynott – Scéalta Ón Old Town, aired on RTE in December 2018 in which Lynott remarked ‘When I'm in England, I'm Irish. When I'm in Ireland, I'm from Dublin. When I'm in Dublin, I'm from Crumlin’ highlighting how he felt always marginalised.

6 We did not limit the sample to people born in Ireland = Irish because many ethnically Irish (and racially white) Irish people have been born in the UK, Australia, Canada and the US. In addition, many of the non-Irish partners, identified as people of colour (black, Asian, etc.) and not-Irish (in terms of citizenship), but felt they were culturally Irish. We allowed subjects to define for themselves who was Irish and who was not based on a combination of factors including place of birth, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and race.

7 The project complies with best professional ethical practice and the project was approved by the Maynooth University Ethical Approval Committee. All interviewees gave their express consent to be interviewed. Read more about the 36 interviewees in (King-O’Riain 2015).