Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (review)

The problem of racism in Ireland has long been complicated by a number of factors, the chief of which are Ireland's colonial relationship with Great Britain and the evolution, from the earliest times available to historical memory, of a nationalist sensibility characterized by the unique ethnic identity of the Irish people. Contemporary postcolonial studies concerning Ireland often imply that a people who have been treated as inferior specimens of humanity could not treat others in their turn as inferior. Charles Kingsley's infamous remarks about the "human chimpanzees" that occupy the "horrible country" of Ireland have been duly noted as part of a critique of the "racialization" inherent in British colonial discourse. More recently, an inverse form of this kind of racialized cultural description can be found in Irish literature and film; for example, in Roddy Doyle's The Commitments, Jimmy remarks that "the Irish are the niggers of Europe" and that "Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland."

In Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland, Bryan Fanning adduces both of these descriptions, but not in order to claim that racism does not exist because the Irish have long been its victims. Rather, Fanning is interested in pursuing the reality of racism that too often cloaks itself in the rhetoric of national identity and xenophobia. While Fanning is sensitive to the fact that Irish people have been victimized by racism, his warrant is to examine the forms of racism that define the attitude of the Irish people and Irish institutions toward the Other—specifically, refugees, asylum seekers, and the Traveller community. He makes a good case against the "monoculturalism" that has defined Irish social policy since the Free State, which is rooted in a centuries-long tradition of defining Irish identity as that which is not British. Following Benedict Anderson's concept of the "imagined community," Fanning argues that Irish monoculturalism forms the most important ideological support for Catholic nationalism. To be sure, "the rhetoric of Catholic nationalism was in many ways a response to racism within Victorian representations of the Irish"; the sad irony of this response is that nationalism became the seedbed for social policies that were, at least according to Fanning, intrinsically racist. The social and economic exclusion of the Protestant minority that lost power and influence after the establishment of the Free State is only one example of this intrinsic racism. Among the most famous and most injurious example was the Limerick pogrom of 1904, in which a form of socioeconomic anti-Semitism was deployed to drive out Jews who were accused of usurping Irish jobs and trade. In the newspapers and political discourse, a process of social construction cast Jews "as enemies not just of Catholicism but of Ireland."

This undeniable blot on the Irish national character was followed, in both the Free State and the Republic, by more entrenched and bureaucratic forms of racism that confronted Jewish refugees during and after the Second World War. Fanning draws on Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners to argue that anti-Semitic racism in Ireland was not restricted to a few politicians or state functionaries; on the contrary, it was part of a monoculturalist nationalism. This form of racism, according to Fanning, appeared to conform to the kind of racialist thinking codified in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. The most comprehensive villain in this respect was Charles Bewley, a senior official at the Irish Legation in Germany. Official Irish immigration policy with respect to Jews was indeed racist, with some preference given to "mixed" Jews and those who had converted to Catholicism. And while de Valéra's own attitudes were more progressive, those who had immediate authority on the ground, especially abroad, tended to determine actual immigration policy. Irish policy was "generally liberal" with regard to refugee children, but this liberality did not extend to Jewish children. Out of one thousand refugee children admitted...