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>> 89 3 Bar Wars Irish Bar Politics in Neoliberal Ireland and Neoliberal Yonkers During the early 1990s, the southeast section of McLean Avenue witnessed the arrival of several stand-alone drinking establishments that were patronized largely by working-class, undocumented Irish immigrant newcomers. This shift marked the arrival of bad Paddies in the city of Yonkers. In response to homeowners’ complaints, the city council issued a moratorium on new bars in 1996, and a heightened police presence was dispatched to quell potential bar-related trouble. Conflicts between the Yonkers Police Department and bar patrons ensued, which in one case resulted in a federal indictment against two officers for violating the civil rights of the Irish immigrants in their custody. These episodes were extensions of the city’s historic indifference to members of its working class, but the event that followed was less predictable. In the early years of the new millennium, rumors began to circulate that an Irish Guinness pub was planned for the Getty Square neighborhood of southwest Yonkers. In step with a $3.1 billion agreement, the Guinness pub would be part of larger strategy to bring a more affluent, largely white demographic (including good Paddies) to this working-class and working-poor Black and Latino neighborhood. Though the Guinness pub never materialized, how can we make sense of this incongruity? 90 > 91 what the late Neil Smith would call “revanchist,” embodying “a revengeful and reactionary viciousness” toward people of color accused of “stealing” the city from white residents.3 Redevelopment in southwest Yonkers should be considered in this light, as a form of revenge against Blacks and Latinos for “taking” Getty Square from its former white ethnic residents, but also as retribution for the costly desegregation suit that nearly bankrupted the city. This “reactionary viciousness” reared its ugly head at a televised Yonkers town hall debate in 2006. When a young African American man questioned where the city’s minorities would shop if Getty Square were to become home to high-end retail, he was dismissed angrily and charged with “race baiting” and “using the race card.” In fact, one white male audience member was so angered by this question that he had to be restrained physically by other audience members.4 Redevelopment in Yonkers has everything to do with race. In my analysis of neoliberal Irish bar politics, race is not, as white and middleclass Yonkers residents suggest, a ploy used by the African American community. Instead, race is an agent of neoliberalism, serving a larger “racial project” that keeps white structures of power intact.5 Neoliberal policies in Yonkers, which will create a more policed, privatized, and unequal city, find widespread support precisely because they assess and value different cohorts of urban dwellers. In this case, a Guinness pub is possible in southwest Yonkers because it could appeal to white, affluent consumers and displace working-class Black and Latino residents. Disguised as an “ethnic” experience, this purportedly color-blind policy can appear less racist.6 And Irish immigrant bars and patrons were policed aggressively during the 1990s because they had the potential to make predominantly white and middle-class sections of southeast Yonkers less class-exclusive, and therefore less racially exclusive. My examination of these different outcomes offers neoliberalism as more than mere policy, but as a condition of everyday life. In showing the human costs of this type of development, my work corresponds to examinations of urban communities under this logic.7 Neoliberal Ireland In 1994, Ken Gardiner, an investment banker at a London branch of Morgan Stanley, made a comparison between the Republic of Ireland 92 > 93 neoliberal models during the 1970s. After Ireland joined the European Economic Community in 1972, low corporate tax rates attracted many western European corporations. After these companies divested and relocated from Ireland during the 1980s, when the terms of their tax abatement expired, growth declined and unemployment soared. With an unemployment rate of nearly 20 percent, one of the highest in all of Europe, many young people left Ireland for the United States and cities like New York. The movement of capital and jobs from Ireland created an opening for U.S. corporations seeking new markets for computers and health care technology, an interest that peaked after the creation of a single European market in 1992. Ireland’s low corporate tax rate of 10 percent was raised to 12.5 percent in 1996 but still was quite low in comparison to rates of 30 or 40 percent...

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