The 2004 Irish Citizenship Referendum debate must be situated within a longer history of Irish racial formation and cannot be understood as an isolated constitutional adjustment. While public figures invoked racialised tropes of Black maternity as opportunistic, narratives of ‘citizenship tourism’ circulated within state discourse that presented the amendment as a race-neutral administrative correction. By distinguishing implicitly between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrant, political rhetoric positioned whiteness as the tacit norm of national belonging and reinforced anxieties about blackness in Ireland. This paper argues that such discourse entrenched an existing structure of exclusion, establishing Irishness as hereditary and consolidating whiteness at the centre of the nation.
Philomena Mullen (Tue,) studied this question.
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