Responding to the Racialisation of Irishness: Disavowed Multiculturalism and its Discontents

This article begins by discussing the specificities of racism in the Republic of Ireland. Critiquing multiculturalist and top-down antiracism policies, it argues that Irish multiculturalist initiatives are anchored in a liberal politics of recognition of difference, which do not depart from western cultural imperialism and are therefore inadequate for deconstructing inter-ethnic power relations. Multiculturalist approaches to antiracism result in the top-down ethnicisation of Irish society, and are failing to intervene in the uneasy interface of minority and majority relations in Ireland. Instead of a ‘politics of recognition’ guiding multiculturalist initiatives, I conclude the article by developing Hesse's (1999) idea of a ‘politics of interrogation’ of the Irish ‘we’ and propose disavowed multiculturalism as a way of theorising Irish responses to ethnic diversity. Interrogating the Irish ‘we’ cannot evade interrogating the painful past of emigration, a wound still festering because it was never tended, and which, I would suggest, is returning to haunt Irish people through the presence of the immigrant ‘other’.