Racialising Irishness: The 2004 citizenship referendum and its enduring legacy

Introduction

From the mid-1990s, Irish public discourse depicted migration as a strain on public services, particularly in the context of asylum-seekers and maternity care (Breen et al., 2006). A 2000 article by Gemma O’Doherty in The Irish Independent exemplifies this discursive construction, detailing concerns from senior medical staff and immigration officials regarding the increasing number of non-EU pregnant women, particularly Nigerians, arriving in Ireland to give birth (O’Doherty, 2000). O’Doherty ¹ framed maternity hospitals as overwhelmed by asylum-seeking mothers, citing hospital staff and Garda immigration officials who alleged systematic exploitation of Ireland's citizenship laws. Peter McKenna, Master of the Rotunda Hospital ² , was quoted as saying, ‘We’re past the stage of being surprised at the number of refugees giving birth in Ireland but I have no doubt whatsoever that the system is being exploited’. Labour ward manager in Holles Street, Kathryn MacQuillan described a dramatic rise in asylum-seeker births, with many arrivals being in such advanced stages of pregnancy that some were transported directly from ports and airports in ambulances, ‘as late as 39 or 40 weeks’. Another source, Garda Sergeant Eamon Hession of Dun Laoghaire Port claimed, ‘They’re coming in very close to birth and seem to be waiting until the very last minute to make the trip over’ (O’Doherty, 2000). The article's perspective suggested that maternity services were being placed under quantifiable strain due to these late-term arrivals, amplifying claims that these women were strategically timing their entry into Ireland to obtain citizenship for their children.

Embedded within a wider negative depiction of migrants ³ as opportunistic individuals whose primary intent was to exploit public resources (Integra, 2000), this discursive construction of maternity hospitals as sites of crisis amidst a systemic abuse of Ireland's citizenship laws provided the initial justificatory groundwork for the 2004 Citizenship Referendum (Crowley et al., 2006) ⁴ . Narratives such as ‘State Alert as Pregnant Asylum Seekers Aim for Ireland’ (Hickey, 2001) converged with portrayals of asylum-seekers and refugees as inherently fraudulent (Newman, 1998), forging – in both senses of the word, creation and artifice – public anxieties about migrants. As Loyal (2011: 84) observes: ‘Asylum-seekers and refugees were not only effectively portrayed as biologically and culturally different, but as ‘bogus’ claimants responsible for increasing unemployment, welfare fraud, the housing and health system crises, [and] rising crime levels’. This racialised framing of migrants as Black became so pervasive that it found expression in mainstream sociological discourse. Jary and Jary (2000: 386) point out in their widely used Sociology textbook, ‘There have been a number of MORAL PANICS [capitalised in the original] about immigration since 1945, focusing on the immigration of black people, and it is therefore important to distinguish between immigrants and black people; it is wrong to assume that an immigrant is black, and it is equally wrong to assume that a black person is an immigrant’. This observation enacts how racialised narratives of migration circulate through the collapsing of racial and national categories, constructing the association of blackness with national non-belonging. This conflation enabled the portrayal of Black women's reproduction as a demographic threat, a framing that intensified in the lead-up to the 2004 Referendum. In 2004 the government proposed the Twenty-Seventh Amendment to restrict the existing jus soli framework that had been carried through the 1998 Belfast Agreement. The poll authorised this transition to a descent-based model and produced the constitutional basis for the post-referendum administrative regime.

This narrative of medical discourse on crisis and abuse was strategically elided in subsequent justificatory rationales by proponents of the 2004 Referendum (Brennock, 2004a, 2004b), to a measure of national self-protection (Burroughs, 2015), a necessary but neutral administrative intervention to close a perceived loophole in Ireland's jus soli citizenship provisions, enshrined in the Constitution following the 1998 Belfast Agreement ⁵ (McDowell, 2021). It was argued that Ireland's constitutional framework made it an international outlier within the European Union, positioning it as uniquely vulnerable to this kind of exploitation (McDowell, 2021). Nevertheless, the interpellation of non-nationals making ‘‘illegal’ crossings via the birth canal’ into Irishness (Thornton, 2019: 80) was an important framing that shaped public perception, maintained narratives of threat, and sought to legitimise the restrictive citizenship measures of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland ushered in by the passage of the referendum (Guillaumond, 2016).

This article contends that the referendum exceeded questions of public service pressure or welfare dependency (Allen, 2004) and cannot be reduced to a legal or administrative adjustment (McDowell, 2021); it marked the constitutional consolidation of an established structure of antiblackness within Irish political culture. Nor was it an electoral ploy by the unpopular right wing government of the day in the face of growing public dissatisfaction with government performance and political opportunism and whataboutery ⁶ (Brennock, 2004d, 2004e), or even as the inevitable result of a developing downturn for the Tiger economy (Guillaumond, 2016). Instead, the poll is better understood as a racialised measure designed to maintain Irishness with a ‘normative whiteness at the core’ (O’Malley, 2020: 517), by constructing Black (that is racialised-as-Black) migrants, and particularly Black mothers, as figures bent on exploiting the ‘generosity of our idea of citizenship’ (O’Toole, 2019). This racialised framing, which positioned Black mothers as the ontological embodiment of fraudulent exploitation (Lentin and Moreo, 2015), is more indicative of an antiblackness within Irish state and media discourse, what I have labelled elsewhere as Ireland's generational antiblackness (Mullen, 2025a). Confronted with national discourses that construct Irishness as inherently white in ‘ethno-racially rigid’ terms (Lentin and Moreo, 2015: 885), Ireland's exclusionary practices in relation to blackness foreground the persistence of antiblackness within the national imaginaries. To understand how this antiblackness functions within state practice, it is germane to examine the construction of the migrant in Ireland and the distinction that emerges between what may be termed the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrant.

‘Good’ versus ‘bad’ migrant

An examination of Irish newspaper discourse on discrimination against migrants prior to 1980 sees a consistent pattern in which such discussions overwhelmingly reference anti-Irish sentiment in Britain. Isolated accounts detailing racial prejudice against ‘dark-skinned people in this country’ (Ribeiro de Santana, 1974) acknowledged the presence of discrimination within Ireland itself (sometimes subtly, see ‘Why this little boy cried all night’ (see Cavanagh, 1986; Stuart, 1979), such perspectives, however, were rare. Instead, Irish media and political discourse predominantly positioned discrimination against racialised groups as an external concern, with Britain framed as a site of hostility towards Irish emigrants ⁷ . This discourse shifted markedly during the early 1980s, a decade before the onset of Celtic Tiger migration patterns, as media narratives began to reflect either explicitly negative portrayals of those racialised as Black and Other, or a tone of moral reproach directed at the Irish public for exhibiting discriminatory attitudes reminiscent of British racialised logics (Shaw, 1986). This shift did not target new migrants alone; it extended to Black Irish people and other racialised individuals, including those born as citizens, reinforcing exclusionary narratives that problematised racial difference within Ireland's imagined racial community.

This transformation in public discourse suggests the ways in which migration was reimagined within Irish social and political consciousness, with earlier narratives of victimhood increasingly giving way to anxieties about Ireland's visible and diversifying population. This shift in discourse not only recast migrants as potential threats but contributed to the emergence of a hierarchy of belonging, one that distinguished between those migrants who could be absorbed into dominant conceptions of Irishness and those who could not. Within this framework, the ‘good migrant’ emerged as a figure defined not only by cultural familiarity but also by racial legibility. If we examine public and political discourse about migrants to Ireland since 1922, a discernible pattern emerges in the construction of this figure who is consistently racialised as white. It is important to note that while cultural, linguistic and national affiliations influence perceptions of belonging, whiteness itself remains the primary criterion – a prerequisite from which blackness, regardless of birthplace or citizenship status, is excluded.

The ‘good migrant’ is embodied by those from Britain – whether Scottish, Welsh, English, or Northern Irish – whose whiteness is framed within a shared cultural familiarity. These migrants are marked by what we might term ‘WASPC’ status: White Anglo-Saxon, Protestant/Catholic. Such migrants may or may not have prior Irish connections, but their cultural proximity and linguistic alignment with Irish society positions them as migrants who attract no undue attention from the state. The notion of the ‘good migrant’ extends beyond Britain to include white European migrants, particularly from Western Europe. Migrants from English-speaking nations such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, all of which have substantial Irish diasporic communities shaped by prolonged histories of Irish emigration, are also positioned within this WASPC framework. South Africa is not a white-majority nation, so the framing of South African migrants as desirable centred on those of Irish and European descent, foregrounding the association between whiteness and positive discursive spaces in Irish migration discourse. The common denominator across these groups is their whiteness, which facilitates a presumed cultural and social compatibility with Irish society. A contemporary example, the naturalisation of three white-presenting rugby players, Joe Schmidt (New Zealand), Richardt Strauss (South Africa) and Olly Hodges (Australia), who were lauded as ‘warriors’ of Irish rugby (Duncan, 2015), speaks to this dynamic of whiteness functioning as a symbolic and ready marker of belonging.

That is not to say that whiteness in Ireland has not been subject to contestation on occasion. The Mincéirí (Irish Travellers), to take an enduring example, have been racialised on ethnic and cultural grounds for centuries, and continue to face discrimination despite their white-presenting phenotype. Groups such as the Huguenots in the late 17th century, the Palatines in the early 18th century, the Jewish community from the 19th century onward, and Irish Protestants in the 20th century experienced varying forms of marginalisation. While these groups have historically faced exclusion, their capacity for eventual assimilation confirms how whiteness, though contested, is ultimately reconcilable with Irishness under certain conditions.

The notion of the ‘good migrant’ has, with the expansion of the European Union, gradually widened to include Eastern European nationals, who have a white-presenting phenotype. However, this inclusion remains conditional and may be shaped by hierarchies of class and occupation. The racial killings of Pawel Kalite and Marius Szwajkos in 2008, Lukasz Rzeszutko two years later and Josip Strok in 2024 illustrate how Eastern European migrants, despite their whiteness, may be vulnerable to racialised violence and social exclusion. This conditionality points to a pattern in which whiteness alone may, in certain circumstances, not guarantee full inclusion, particularly for migrants positioned within precarious labour sectors or working-class communities. Whiteness, while central to the figure of the ‘good migrant’, is mediated to some degree by factors such as religion, language/accent, class and perceived cultural conformity to the imagined national norm.

This complex history of racial and ethnic hierarchies reveals that the ‘good migrant’ in Ireland is not simply white, but white in ways that conform to prevailing constructions of Irishness. The case of Belgian refugees, many of whom were Catholics, welcomed in 1914, yet subsequently made suspect during the political upheavals of 1916 (due, in part, to their perceived alignment with Great Britain), illustrates how shifting nationalist anxieties can destabilise even potentially ‘good’ migrant status. The racialisation of Gibraltar's wartime refugees in Northern Ireland, whose tanned skin and accented English marked them as Other, and the poor treatment of Hungarian refugees to Ireland in 1956 – ironically the same year that the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act expanded pathways to citizenship – suggests that whiteness alone has not been sufficient to ensure stable belonging. The perceived cultural, political or economic threat posed by certain groups may override racial commonality. IRA-led agrarian campaigns against Dutch and German landowners in the post-war period point to this conditionality of whiteness. Before the founder of the anti-migrant Immigration Control Platform party, Áine Ní Chonaill, became fixated on Black migrants in the 1990s (Ní Chonaill, 2005: 18), her anti-immigration campaign targeted white British and Dutch residents in her native Cork, framing their presence as far back as 1983 as part of Ireland's alleged ‘over-population’ (O’Reilly, 2012: 58) ⁸ .

These examples demonstrate that while whiteness has functioned as a key determinant of the ‘good migrant’, this framework is contingent, and may be shaped by shifting anxieties around cultural nationalism and classed ethnoracial stability. Yet, these exclusions have tended to be episodic and politically unstable. Unlike the enduring hostility reserved for those racialised as Black or Other, exclusionary impulses towards white migrants have been far more inconsistent and ultimately reconcilable. Even in the case of the Mincéirí, who continue to face discrimination, both interpersonal and structural, on ethnic and cultural grounds, their white-presenting phenotype affords them a degree of racialised privilege. Although this does not mitigate the discriminatory violences they endure, it demonstrates how whiteness functions as a protective factor in racialised encounters in Ireland ⁹ .

The ‘good migrant’ category, though not immune to periodic contestation, has largely retained its association with whiteness, enforcing racial boundaries that define the limits of Irish belonging. In contrast, the category of the ‘bad migrant’ has maintained far greater consistency, and is revelatory of what I argue is Ireland's generational antiblackness. This enduring hostility, directed at those racialised-as-Black, points to a deeper structure of exclusion that transcends moments of political turbulence or economic anxiety, operating instead as a persistent feature of Irish racial discourse.

Resist the ‘n*****s and cannibals’: the persistence of antiblackness

Although blackness in Ireland is, to use Rinaldo Walcott's term, mainly ‘borrowed’ (2003: 146) through historical and recent ‘ontolog[ies] of African mobility’ (Knudsen and Rahbek, 2016: 292), blackness has a documented history stretching back centuries. While a body of research confirms an Irish Black population ¹⁰ from the 1700s (Bryan and Cabellero, 2024; Hart, 2002), the biologisation of Irishness as unchallenged whiteness denies the existence of blackness in Ireland. From a historical perspective this is surprising since a diarist in the popular Freeman's Journal, dated 23–25 Oct. 1777, felt able to chastise a crowd who interfered, carrying both racialised and gendered overtones, with a Black woman and child near the fashionable side of Georgian Stephen's Green:

… a female black and child… was so closely pressed by the multitude of people crowding round, and staring at her, … Had she in any manner differed from others of her colour and country so common to meet with [emphasis mine], it might have been some apology, to gratify curiosity: that not being the case, it reflects both scandal and ignorance on the company. (Hart, 2002: 19)

Despite the diarist's admonishment, blackness and this historical Black presence have always unsettled Irish conceptions of the nation, with antiblackness emerging in tension with this unsettlement and not confined to contemporary immigration debates. This tension is shaped by the country's dual position as both colonised and coloniser, what Loyal describes as being victim and perpetrator of the ‘ethnic and racial hierarchies that were ultimately created by the imperialist conquest of the world’ (2011: 173). From its earliest moments of independence, the state was shaped by racial formations in which blackness was positioned as incompatible with Irishness. Even within the proto-state, the secular father of the nation, Arthur Griffith, provided a public defence of John Mitchel's pro-slavery position in the 1913 edition of Jail Journal. Griffith's insistence that ‘as if excuse were needed for an Irish Nationalist declining to hold the negro his peer in right’ (Griffith, 1913: xii) calls forth the extent to which exclusionary premises were foundational to the emerging nationalist framework which eschewed postcolonial solidarities.

This refusal to accept blackness as part of Ireland's imagined community was coeval with the birth of the Irish state in 1922. Matthew Brennan's one-act farce, The Young Man from Rathmines opened in April of that year to packed houses at the Abbey Theatre. Set in a one-room tenement flat on Dominick Street in Northside Dublin, the playlet is full of familiar (and somewhat tendentious) tropes of class and gender centred around the Dowd family, engaged in excited preparation for the arrival of the titular young man. He has been corresponding with the family's daughter and is seen as a prospective suitor. When George is revealed in the final scene to be Black, the white Dubliners are reduced to tearful incomprehension, while the father prepares in the final lines of a farce that continues to be performed in 21st century Irish schools ¹¹ , to thrash the young man for his unexpected raciality:

MR DOWD: An’ it was for a black haythen that I was made put on this.

The play's brusque articulation of blackness as incompatible with Irishness, even in its most impoverished and marginalised form, found echoes in Mac Gréil's 1972 momentum model of society survey, which involved nearly 3000 Dublin residents, and revealed a ‘high and severe degree’ of anti-Black prejudice in the city (Mac Gréil, 1977: 244). Conducted two decades before the inward migration patterns associated with the Celtic Tiger era, this study exposed a persistent racial hostility that suggested racist attitudes uncovered ‘were … largely “latent” or “dormant”’ (Ferriter, 2023), and indicative of this enduring antiblackness within white Irish Western modernity.

The absence of Black individuals from archival records, except in moments of criminalisation or suspicion, should not confirm Ireland as a homogeneously white nation. While legal records document Black presence through narratives of deviance, this selective visibility distorts the broader reality of Black life. Saidiya Hartman (2019) observes, marginalised subjects often appear in the archive only when their lives are ruptured by violence or crisis, leaving much of their existence undocumented. If some Black individuals surface in such records, many others endured lives of quiet exclusion and Thoreauvian quiet desperation, unseen and unrecorded yet equally shaped by racial marginalisation. The 20th century saw the presence of hundreds of Black children, like the author, who were born to white Irish mothers and African or Caribbean fathers, but they remain absent from Irish archival records. A project I am leading has identified up to 700 African students in Trinity College Dublin alone during this period. This community of scholars played a significant role in Irish social life and the global political stage, as evidenced in contemporary newspaper reports, yet their contributions remain largely excluded from the historical record. They also left an enduring legacy: the birth of hundreds of Black children absent from the racial narrative of 20th century Ireland (Mullen, 2025b). The example I provide to my students, as a professor of Black Studies, is to imagine a group of future Black Studies scholars examining Irish census records, using my name and the fact I am Black, to investigate racial formation in 20th-century Ireland. The question I pose is what such records would reveal about Black life in Ireland, how Irish society understood blackness, or how racism was embedded in social structures during that time? Given that my blackness is not recorded until the 2006 census, these scholars would encounter a historical silence, one that speaks less to the absence of Black lives and more to the erasure of their presence.

Blackness when it does appear does so through moments of rupture. The Irish anti-jazz movement in the 1920s-30s, which, although ostensibly targeting British cultural influence, also bore distinctly racial connotations. Large crowds marched against jazz, and the population was warned not to ‘disgrace our Irish Saints’ but to resist the ‘music of John Bull, n*****s and cannibals’ (Leitrim Observer, 1934). The racial animus of the time was visible in newspaper accounts on the African students (and princes) who detailed the overt racism they faced while studying in Dublin (Irish Independent, 1932). Newspaper accounts throughout the 20th century report on this violent antiblackness, from being fined for relations with white women to physical assaults, suggesting a refusal to confront uncomfortable truths about Irish antiblackness, the dynamic of ‘not knowing and not wanting to know’ (Wekker, 2016: 17). The gravity of such persistent violence, from Patrick Udenze, a Nigerian student at University College Dublin, who lost an eye following an attack in November 1963 (Fanning, 2018), to the first recorded racially motivated killing in the state ¹² , that of 21-year-old Libyan trainee pilot, Abousef Abdussalem Salim in 1984 because he was a ‘n****r’ (Irish Times, 1984), brings into focus a pattern of racial hostility that targeted Black and racialised as Black individuals as threats to Ireland's imagined racial homogeneity.

Blackness and the migrant as Black

It is against the exclusionary structure of this generational antiblackness that we must examine the construction of the migrant in the run-up to the 2004 Referendum, as blackness was constituted as a racialised threat to Irish whiteness. The Ireland of 1990s ‘software hothouse[s], of Riverdance, e-commerce and property speculators, with its cosmopolitan cities and an increasingly self-confident, agnostic, entrepreneurial and worldly youth’ (MacLachlan and O’Connell, 2001: 2) visually coded migration as Black in media coverage and public discourse, producing a racialised synecdoche in which blackness operated as a shorthand for non-national. Cullen's Refugees and Asylum-Seekers in Ireland (2000) illustrates this persistent visual conflation of migration with blackness. Although the text discusses migrants from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, its cover depicts a Black child gazing up at several Black men, symbolically framing immigration as a distinctly Black experience. This visual emphasis relies on the association of blackness with non-belonging, and overshadows the broad complexities of Ireland's migration landscape. Ronit Lentin similarly observed this tendency in her account of a June 2003 demonstration, where a large crowd of predominantly white Eastern European parents, children and babies gathered to protest the threatened deportation of migrant parents of Irish-born children. Despite the demographics of the protest, media coverage instead chose to foreground the image of a Black African baby though white European babies were present (Lentin, 2004).

Such framing not only distorts public perceptions of migration but entrenches a narrative in which blackness becomes emblematic of immigration itself, embedding antiblackness within Irish public consciousness by consistently casting blackness as inherently foreign. This overdetermination of blackness as the primary marker of migration had material consequences. By racialising migrants as Black and, conversely, positioning Black people as migrants, Irish discourse constructed a framework in which blackness appeared incommensurable with Irish belonging. These exclusionary structures shaped the lived experiences of those racialised as Black migrants and Black Irish citizens alike, who remained subject to suspicion and exclusion despite their Irishness, as blackness continued to be marked as Other within dominant constructions of the nation.

One of the keystones of anti-migrant inflection in state discourse is the capture and the turning around of language with a view to obfuscating its underlying intent (Roy, 2024). One example of this language capture is the use of the term ‘undocumented’ in Irish political discourse to refer to Irish citizens illegally resident in the U.S., while the term ‘illegal’ is applied to migrants in Ireland, who must be ‘prevented and controlled’ (Burroughs, 2015: 494) ¹³ . When then Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell popularised the term ‘citizenship tourism’ in relation to migrants in parliamentary debates leading up to the 2004 Referendum (Dáil Éireann, 2004: col 583), he warned that if the law were not changed, ‘hordes of impoverished women and babies will start moving between EU states’ (Brennock, 2004c), with the coded implication being that these mother and baby hordes would overwhelm Ireland. The racialised character of this construct was made explicit in the 2000 Irish Independent article referenced earlier, which identified these mother and baby hordes as ‘mainly Nigerians’ (O’Doherty, 2000). In case this racial threat still remained unclear, Irish Times columnist Kevin Myers, in guise of Horatio on the bridge defending the Irish republic (Myers, 2007), asserted the racialised representation of migrant m/others and claimed that there was an ‘uncountable number of Nigerians in Ireland’ (Myers, 2003). Lest the Irish public be inclined towards welcoming this regeneration of Irishness, Myers helpfully warned that Nigeria only ‘has two main natural resources: oil and fraud’ (Myers, 2003).

Leaving aside Myers's evident lack of mathematical knowledge (especially regarding Georg Cantor's work on countability), his and McDowell's medical discourse of crisis and abuse legitimised racial reasoning through which Black maternity and Black babies were not constituted as threats to public resources or to McDowell's vision of a liberal economy that embraced economic inequality ¹⁴ , but to Irish racial imaginaries (Luibhéid, 2013). Despite evidence that births to non-EU national mothers comprised less than 2.4 percent of total births at Dublin's three major maternity hospitals in 2003 (King, 2004), this rhetoric amplified racial anxieties and ‘black asylum-seekers became the negative markers of difference’ (Loyal, 2011: 149). What was being constructed as a ‘strain’ and exploitation of public services was a question of who was giving birth (Allen, 2004). Brannigan (2009: 285) argued that the Irish State is ‘instrumental in generating some of the terms within which racialized categories are made effective within the social sphere, most obviously in conceiving of immigration solely as a social problem, and adopting a rhetoric of crisis and alarm in response to particular groups of immigrants’. This continuity is unsurprising, ‘laws, conventions and judicial pronouncements […] do not exist in a vacuum. They reflect, as do all laws, the priorities and concerns of the people who make them, and of those whom such lawmakers represent’ (Cubie and Ryan, 2004: ix).

The campaign's focus on Nigerian mothers draws attention to this racial, heteronormative reasoning most clearly. McDowell's claim that ‘anyone with eyes in their head’ (Hennessy, 2004) could see the abuse of Ireland's citizenship laws relied on a visual coding of Black bodies as markers of illegitimacy. Nigerian women were constructed as the visual embodiment of social threat, their presence in maternity hospitals presented as evidence of calculated abuse, as was that of their children. McDowell's invocation of ‘787 Nigerian children’ as evidence of citizenship abuse (Hennessy, 2004) exemplifies the racialisation of the referendum debate. As Moriarty (2006) observes, McDowell's reference to these children, who were, under existing legal jus soli provisions, Irish citizens, normalised the notion that blackness itself signified abuse. Yet the state's own data contradicted this narrative; many of those identified as last-minute arrivals were, in reality, internal transfers resulting from the state's asylum dispersal policies (King, 2004). The ‘crisis’ in maternity services thus reflected not numbers but entrenched racial anxieties that had already constructed blackness as social threat.

The narrative of ‘hordes’ of non-national mothers was coded to mean too many Black African mothers and children, drawing on long-standing racist anxieties about Black fertility and reproduction, and their demographic threat to whiteness was expressed in stories of cancellations of maternity consultations by indigenous [Irish] pregnant women, whom we may read parenthetically as white (O’Regan, 2002). The consistent association between non-national births and blackness, amplified in media and political rhetoric, ‘but reproduced and circulated through hearsay and urban legends’ (Moriarty, 2006: 302), ensured that discussions about immigration and state resources only for the deserving were filtered through fears of racial transformation, and made known to the Irish public through the structuring of the debate around crisis and abuse of taxpayer resources.

This rhetorical strategy of proponents of the referendum functioned as a mechanism of racial governance, interpellating blackness as being ‘ungeographic’ (McKittrick, 2006: 10), that is the positioning of Black bodies as out of place and beyond the boundaries of belonging. Nigerian mothers, in particular, though it should be noted that the category African ‘was sometimes interchangeable with’ Nigerian in Irish official discourse (O’Brien-Olinger, 2016: 32), were positioned as archetypes of manipulation and racial opportunism, with blackness codified as a visual signifier of non-belonging. Such language reinforced the reductive binaries that structured Irish migration discourse, with the ‘implied white Irish citizen’ (Huber, 2023: 777) positioned as entitled to resources and protection, whereas the racialised Other, who was implicitly Black, was marked as a disruptive force.

McDowell and the rhetoric of racial governance

What has been noted about the argument I present above regarding white Irish fragility is that McDowell, the ideological driver of the 2004 Referendum, was well aware of this exclusionary reasoning on the part of the state, and was most eloquent in denouncing them (O’Toole, 2002). Blackness as a disruptive force within Ireland's exclusionary racial formation was identified by McDowell in 1998, when he condemned the ‘red-necked discrimination’ of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform ¹⁵ , whose immigration policy was ‘racially prejudiced’ and driven by a covert commitment to preserving Ireland's racial homogeneity (McDowell, 1998). His fervent argument laid out the case that in a manner reminiscent of how the Irish state racialised European Jews as the undesirable Other in the 1930s and 1940s, Ireland at the turn of the Millennium was positioning blackness as an anomaly in need of correction within the Irish state's conception of national belonging. Denouncing the ‘indignity and contempt’ with which the Irish state treated ‘mainly Black – men, women, and children’, McDowell warned that such practices on the part of the state's mechanism of racial governance risked developing into ‘apartheid in kid gloves’ (McDowell, 1998).

Peter O’Mahony, of the Irish Refugee Council, observed in 2006 that ‘[t]he single greatest obstacle to obtaining leave to remain in Ireland is having Nigerian origin’ (Coulter, 2006). McDowell's insistence that the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform operated with the unspoken aim of keeping Ireland ‘racially homogeneous’ (McDowell, 1998) spoke directly to this antiblackness being the state's racial project. Back in 1998, the architect of the 2004 Referendum averred that his ‘blood boiled – or froze’ when confronted with what he saw as the Department's expression of antiblackness, adding that he had been sickened by the ‘appalling spectacle of a Dublin-Belfast bus being escorted by squad cars because there was a black man on it who turned out to be a long-term Belfast resident’ (McDowell, 1998). In voicing his outrage, McDowell exposed the aversive racism of the Irish state's racial project where racialised exclusionary impulses masquerade as neutral legal reforms. Recognising the formal denial of explicit racial claims while actively producing exclusionary outcomes, McDowell roundly condemned the state's exclusionary reasoning. He was equally adamant in 2002 that urban myths about asylum seekers fuelled racist attitudes and stressed that four out of five non-nationals in Ireland were not asylum seekers but workers, students or visitors, rejecting the scapegoating of asylum seekers for social service issues and called for a firm rejection of racist narratives (Morahan, 2002).

One may imagine that the McDowell of 1998, in writing his scathing rebuke of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, might, had he consulted the Collins Concise Dictionary, have encountered the second definition of ‘Irish’ as being synonymous with ‘ludicrous or illogical’ (Collins, 1995: 682). This definition serves as a most apposite commentary on the inconsistent yet entrenched racial reasoning at play in McDowell's discourse from 1998 to 2021. His denunciation of what he termed ‘red-necked discrimination’ (McDowell, 1998) may have appeared, at the time, as a principled critique of state racism. Yet McDowell's later role as the chief architect of the 2004 Referendum lays bare his racial politics and his part in the continuity of racialised governance within the Irish state. His racial anxieties in 2004 suggest the fiction that Irish racism ‘arrived in the 1990s, as if on a flight from Lagos or Vilnius’ (Brannigan, 2009: 21). In reality, the referendum's racial ordering drew on much older patterns of antiblackness that offered a vision of the nation as homogeneously white. McDowell's transformation from opponent to architect of racial exclusion illustrates how such ordering adapts to shifting social and political conditions and personal ambition, as well as the vaulting ambition of a failing (Browne, 2004) and ‘beleaguered on all fronts’ (Raftery, 2004) politico.

In 2021, McDowell, in seeking to sanitise the referendum as a procedural correction which ‘did not have some earth-shattering effect on migration, asylum-seeking or the rights of the “new Irish”’ (McDowell, 2021), dismissed concerns about its racial implications as the objections of a ‘small ideological minority’. Such denial is itself a key feature of Irish anti-Black discourse, where antiblackness is framed as imagined, even as state practice continues to secure whiteness as the defining feature of Irishness. It is a denial that McDowell, in 1998, would have called out as ‘apartheid in kid gloves’ (McDowell, 1998).

Conclusion

In reality, the referendum's true effect was the consolidation of Irishness as an exclusionary category, one structured through a chiastic logic in which Irishness is not blackness, and blackness is not Irishness (Mullen, 2025a). By replacing jus soli with jus sanguinis, the referendum made biological descent the primary basis for citizenship. This move reconfigured Irishness as hereditary, structuring racial boundaries without requiring explicit racial language. The referendum entrenched racial exclusion as constitutional necessity.

The racialisation of Black maternity persisted well beyond the referendum. Dr Michael Geary, Master of the Rotunda Hospital, remarked that ‘the number of non-national women presenting to the hospital in the later stages of pregnancy had fallen to almost zero’ (Reid, 2005). He noted that ‘the number of asylum-seekers giving birth at the hospital had halved in recent years’. While Geary insisted his concern was ‘the health of women and their unborn babies’, his framing of the pre-referendum period as a ‘crisis’ – now ‘more or less stopped’ – centred the narrative that births to Black and non-European women had been a problem requiring resolution. The post-referendum period also witnessed a rise in targeted Nigerian deportations, executed through state immigration operations such as Hyphen ¹⁶ , Gladiator, Quest and Sonnet. These operations, framed as bureaucratic enforcement, confirmed that McDowell's language was not merely rhetorical but translated directly into targeted exclusion with the aim of keeping Ireland ‘racially homogenous’ (McDowell, 1998). It also suggested where his focus lay when he opined that he would like to meet all asylum seekers, with their ‘bogus’ ‘cock-and-bull stories’ at the airport and send them back home, but ‘unfortunately, the UN convention requires me to go through due process in respect of all these claims’ (Holland, 2005).

The second half of McDowell ’s (1998) critique of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform was an excoriation of Áine Ní Chonaill's normative preference for sameness (McDowell, 1998). Ní Chonaill, with whom I locked horns at conferences and on TV panels, was steadfast in her belief as to the incommensurability of the Black body within her understanding of the Irish nation. While reluctantly accepting of white-presenting migrants and newcomers (including members of the Jewish community) (Ní Chonaill, 2005: 18), she was determinedly anti-Black and defaulted without solicitation to the view that Black people were ‘less desirable than white immigrants because of their colour’ (O’Reilly, 2012: 59). This phenotypic schema characterised her avowed message ‘in favour of almost zero immigration’, the exception being the ‘Caucasian [who] will eventually merge into our society and only a fool would pretend otherwise’ (Ní Chonaill, 1994).

Beneath ethnonational and neoliberal anxieties, such as those voiced by the Russian economist and lecturer in Trinity College Dublin, Constantin Gurdgiev, who warned that the ‘nation [will] surrender [a] vibrant merit-based society for a pond-life of refugees’ (Gurdgiev, 2004), lay this bedrock of ‘keeping the n*****s out’ (Brannigan, 2009: 223). However much the Irish government sought to deny the claim (Tyrell, 2004), their messaging echoed Ní Chonaill's stance on the incommensurability of blackness. This anti-Black messaging found incarnate form in the hanging of a Black body in effigy from a railway bridge in Longford town just a few days before the vote took place. A bag was placed over the doll's head, and a sign hung around its neck which read ‘N*****s go home - you’ll never be Irish’ (Bradley, 2004).