Integration, migration, and recession in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Fanning, Histories of the Irish Future, 242.

2. Lentin, “Conclusion,” 185.

3. Ibid., 199.

4. Kymlicka, Multiculturalism, 1.

5. Ging and Malcolm, “Interculturalism and Multiculturalism in Ireland,” 127. Cited in Moynihan, “Other People’s Diasporas,” 10.

6. Lentin, “Introduction,” 6.

7. Fanning, Immigration and Social Cohesion, 2.

8. Kymlicka, Multiculturalism, 2.

9. Lentin and Titley, “The Crises of Multiculturalism.”

10. Lentin, “Conclusion,” 199. As Lentin argues elsewhere, recession in Ireland has affected the (although questionable) politics of interculturalism, diversity and integration that Ireland’s immigration regime adopted in the Celtic Tiger period, with a view to avoiding the supposed “failure” of French assimilationism and British multiculturalism. Lentin, “Introduction,” 7–8.

11. Lentin, “Anti-racist Responses to the Racialisation of Irishness,” 233.

12. Over the years, Fanning has been a deeply committed social commentator on immigrant communities in Ireland. In his 2002 book Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland, he analyses the exclusion of ethnic minorities (i.e. Travellers, Jewish refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Five years later, Fanning published Immigration and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (2007), a book more contemporary in outlook in its analysis of the social and political position of new immigrant communities in Ireland between 1997 and 2005. His following study Immigration and Social Cohesion in the Republic of Ireland, published in 2011, specifically addresses the challenges of genuine integration for immigrants in Ireland in the context of the debates of the EU and post-9/11 Western liberal perspectives.

13. Like Fanning, Lentin has conducted most of her research in the area of racism and xenophobia and the controversial impact of migration at the social and political levels. In 2012, Lentin and Moreo co-edited a collection of essays which dealt in a pioneering way with migrant-led activism in Ireland. See Lentin, “Responding to the Racialisation of Irishness”; “Pregnant Silence”; “Anti-racist Responses to the Racialisation of Irishness”; The Expanding Nation; Lentin and McVeigh, After Optimism?; Lentin and Moreo, Migrant Activism and Integration.

14. Lentin, “Conclusion,” 188.

15. Lentin, “Anti-racist Responses to the Racialisation of Irishness,” 233.

16. Lentin and Titley’s main argument in their book is that the whole “benign” discourse of multiculturalism eventually reinforces the very racial inequalities and stereotypes it was originally intended to challenge. As they claim, “the fantasy of integration is central to the stratification and control of migrants and racialised populations”. Lentin and Titley, The Crises of Multiculturalism, 176.

17. McAleese, “Foreword,” vii.

18. Ibid.

19. See, for instance, Faragó and Sullivan, Facing the Other; King and O’Toole, “Memoir, Memory and Migration in Irish Culture”; Mac Éinrí and O’Toole, “New Approaches to Irish Migration”; Villar-Argáiz, Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland.

20. Kiberd, “The Celtic Tiger,” 276.

21. O’Toole, 2011 RTE television documentary Fintan O’Toole: Power Plays.

22. McIvor and Spangler, “Introduction,” 1.

23. Ibid., 10.

24. King, “Irish Multicultural Fiction”; Moynihan, “Other People’s Diasporas”; Villar-Argáiz, Literary Visions of Multicultural Ireland.