The Dublin riot - Ireland's wake-up call (original) (raw)
Ireland: Racial State and Crisis Racism
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2007
This article theorises the state as central to the construction of racism in the Republic of Ireland, which, since the 1990s economic boom, has become an in-migration destination. State racism culminated in the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, in which, at a majority of four to one, the Irish electorate voted for the removal of birth right citizenship to children of migrants. Based on Goldberg's theory of the racial state, which, in constructing homogeneity, obscures existing heterogeneities, and on Foucault's theory of biopolitics, leading to the state supposedly caring for the population through a series of technologies aiming to regulate and manage racial diversities, the article examines recent developments in Ireland's immigration and asylum policies. The debates around the Citizenship Referendum are theorized as constructing what Balibar terms 'crisis racism', blaming migrants for the problems of the system.
An end to “Civil War politics”? The radically reshaped political landscape of post-crash Ireland
Electoral Studies, 2015
The European debt crisis has impacted on electoral politics in most European states, but particularly in the Republic of Ireland. The severe nature of the economic crash and the subsequent application of austerity policies have brought large fluctuations in political support levels, with the three parties that have dominated the state since its foundation e Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and Labour e all being adversely effected. The extent of these changes is highly controlled both by geography and by class, with political allegiances proving to be highly fluid in certain parts of the state. Growing support levels for left wing parties and groupings, but most notably Sinn Fein, appear to be moving Irish politics away from the old "Civil War" style of politics and bringing it more into line with the traditional class cleavage politics of continental Europe.
A ‘Carnival of Reaction’: Partition and the Defeat of Ireland’s Revolutionary Wave
Irish Marxist Review, 2015
For more than a generation, establishment historians and their acolytes in the southern media have dominated public debate about the nature and form of the Irish revolution. In their rendering, the Rising constituted an unnecessary skirmish between a benign, reforming empire and ultra-Catholic madmen and militarists. For many ordinary southerners, understandably cynical about the influence welded by the Catholic Church and a corrupt political establishment since partition, the seeds of conservatism seem apparent from the outset, flowing inevitably from the Rising and the revolutionary upheaval that followed. Since the outbreak of the Troubles in 1969, especially, a persistent and well-resourced effort has been made to show that partition reflected immutable differences between antagonistic ‘ethno-national’ or ‘ethno-religious’ blocs. Despite their rhetorical nationalism, the Dublin elite, fearful that northern political instability might spread southwards, went to great lengths to b...
Austerity, Populism, and Water: Ireland's strange populism and the inevitability of the local
Jean Monnet Working Paper Series No 7/2017
Austerity and economic hardship are common themes in the narratives about the causes of contemporary populism. Ireland, having endured a decade of austerity and a very severe EU-IMF bailout, might therefore seem to be a fertile bed for populism. But Ireland has (so far) seen the effects of populism only in a limited and unusual form. There has been neither a great left-wing populist rise, nor a new nationalist, populist right. Populism manifested chiefly in a movement – powerful and influential in its limited way – to resist payment of water charges. The introduction of domestic water charges with the aim of reducing water waste and improving water infrastructure resulted in massive backlash, far greater than those from more severe consequences of austerity such as tax hikes, sweeping cuts in expenditure, a colossal bank bailout, and very high unemployment. It spawned a populist political movement, rallying and uniting left-wing political parties and creating a major lobby and protest group. Massive demonstrations were held. Workers installing water meters were obstructed and harassed. A senior government official was trapped in her car by water protesters, leading to prosecutions of a number of water protesters for false imprisonment along with considerable public controversy around accusations of political policing. Many Irish people refused to pay water bills sent to them. This has been the major issue championed by anti-austerity and left-wing populist parties, with calls for wide-scale boycotts and protests and even suggestions that a right to water should be inserted into the Irish Constitution. It has been the focal point of Irish politics for the last half decade, affecting the outcome of both local and general elections. This is a strange story of populism. On the one hand, many of the risks often associated with populism – government capitulation to populist demands, creep of mainstream parties towards populist causes, a splintering of the parliament – actualised in Ireland. On the other hand, they actualised in an unusual way that has left the political establishment largely intact: the party that led the imposition of austerity remains in power; political and structural reforms have been minor; concessions to populism have been largely limited to the issue of water. It seems as though populism was contained. I have two goals in this paper. First, I wish to map the idiosyncratic Irish experience, so that it can be considered in discussions of populism; and secondly, I wish to use this example to make a broader point about the local nature of populism. Certainly, Ireland’s experience of populism can only be properly understood in light of its public law and conventions: its electoral system, executive dominated government, centrist political culture, and particular economic circumstances all played a role. From this, it might be thought that generalisable lessons could be learned from the Irish experience about avoiding the worst effects of populism, but I wish to argue that the opposite is true: Ireland’s unique experience shows the irreducible complexity and locality of populism. Populism is always contingent and local, reacting the peculiarities of political culture and circumstance. The best way to study populism is not through theory and search for similarity, but through observation of diversity. While we might see some similarity, pattern, and convergence in populism around the world, this is largely happenstance, and populism will always be recast and remade in each and each place to produce distinct and often unpredictable results. It is, even if while it seems to sweep the world, fundamentally a local phenomenon. The surprising and peculiar characteristics of the Irish case help illustrate the local nature of populism, which should inform any analysis of contemporary populist movements.
In the shadows: Dublin's immigrant policies in the context of highly centralized governance
2025
This article examines Dublin's approach to managing migration, arguing that the city follows a 'pragmatic assimilationist' paradigm (Alexander, 2007; Schiller, 2015) characterised by a reactive stance (van Breugel, 2020), projectisation, and multi-actor 'government' (Schiller, 2018). The findings highlight the dominance of national-level policies in shaping local strategies, which, coupled with the absence of an elected mayor and the limited powers of Dublin City Council, further constrain local governance capabilities. Additionally, the privatised and fragmented local service provision, along with insufficient collaboration with civil society, restricts Dublin's local autonomy as well as civil society's freedom. Through 18 in-depth semi-structured interviews with key informants and document analysis, this study provides detailed empirical insights into Dublin's governance landscape, contributing to the academic discourse on local immigration governance and the factors influencing it.
Occupying Dublin: Considerations at the crossroads
2012
Another global wave of critique and resistance would come, I told myself and anyone who asked. For many years I watched and waited. Not passively, but actively, keeping alive the social memory of movements past, analysing the ever shifting shape of the global system and going into the streets to protest against many forms of exploitation. We no longer had the wind at our backs. Our numbers were small. Our voices were marginalised. Nevertheless we knew that the structural problems that had brought us on to the streets in the beginning had not been solved. As boom led to bust, expropriation intensified by means we never imagined possible. The level of anger rose greatly, but activity not so much. The powerful were even more powerful and we were so powerless. Iceland, Greece, Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Chile, etc, etc. Would it be everywhere but here? Here being a country that had plunged down in the world far more dramatically than most. Yet we beheld signs of Greek protesters saying 'We are not Ireland'. The shame of it. What would it take to get Irish people to act? The trade union movement got 100,000 out on the streets of Dublin in November 2010 and everybody went home again. After beholding the indignant on the squares of the world in 2011, I thought that we had to get out and stay out. Then came Occupy Wall Street. I tweeted: ‚#OccupyIFSC. Up for it?‛ I wasn't the only one. It was in the air. During the first week of October, it got focused. There were already several actions planned for 8 October. There were several small groups planning to be at the Central Bank in Dame Street with a street theatre flavour: one going for 'pots and pans' and another for 'the shirt off our back'. Then #OccupyDublin and #OccupyDameStreet started trending on twitter. On facebook too we got liking and planning. It was spreading like wildfire throughout the US and other countries and continents too. I got reports from Occupy Philadelphia, the place where my protesting began. A meeting to plan it that week attracted massive attendance, including many of my new left friends, veterans of many protests, greyer now but still going, along with many new to protest. The occupation started on 6 October and I was mesmerised by the livestream. I was fascinated by a general assembly where participants responded to the question 'Why are we protesting?' by telling their stories in the calland-response of the mic check ritual. There was a sixties feeling sweeping over me. A Buffalo Springfield song came back to me. It went ‚There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear.‛ I found it on youtube and posted it and it spread. It kept playing in my head. Of course, I knew there was a difference between the 60s and my 60s, but I was determined to be up for it. All week I was on the social networks stirring it up. I do not believe in the idea of facebook or twitter revolutions, because the impetus comes from real social conditions and relations, but these technologies and networks greatly
Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, 2017
Across the EU, the Great Recession begot economic and political crisis heralding a renewed march towards populism and party system fragmentation. Much commentary about Ireland remarked on the absence of a populist surge of the type seen in many other bailout states (Clifford, 2016; Pappas, 2015). But is this characterization of the Irish experience accurate? The imposition of austerity policies and the protracted recovery propelled long standing critics of the Irish economic model centre stage and in common with many other states, party system fragmentation advanced with the long dominant centrist parties suffering severe losses at general elections (Marsh, Farrell and McElroy, 2017; Kriesi et al., 2016). New and more radical political forces did emerge and general elections in 2011 and 2016 were among the most volatile in Western Europe since 1945. The traditional parties of government experienced a sharp contraction in their vote shares but they retained their hold on power and th...
The Irish Election and the possibility of a Left Populism
openDemocracy, 2020
In the immediate aftermath of the recent Irish general election, journalists and commentators around the world invoked that slippery term ‘populism’ to make sense of an electoral outcome that few had anticipated. According to an article in The Atlantic that was widely panned on Twitter, Sinn Féin’s success in winning the highest percentage of first preference votes under Ireland’s proportional representational system confirmed that the “global populist wave” has now arrived in a country where it has heretofore been “conspicuously absent”
From being the "Celtic Tiger" poster child of neo-liberalism, Ireland has moved first into recession and then into an IMF-EU bailout entailing massive cuts, with unemployment at the highest-recorded levels ever, the historically dominant Fianna Fail party alternatively in third or fourth place in polls and an unprecedented level of withdrawal of trust. Yet by contrast with the political upheavals in Iceland and Greece and the dramatic protests in countries like Britain, France and Italy, Ireland has seen remarkably little by way of active protest. The few large events have been determinedly single-issue or thoroughly corralled by conservative unions, radical attempts at organising coordinated movement resistance let alone alternative social directions have failed comprehensively to mobilise popular support, and all the indications are that the election will lead to a relatively routine alternation of power with Labour as junior partner in a government committed to a modified version of neo-liberal austerity. While the Irish left has discussed the economic side of the crisis ad nauseam, little serious attention (in politics or academia) has been given to understanding this situation, which is rather taken as a given. This paper attempts an answer to the question of why responses to the crisis have been so restricted to organisational fixes. It starts with a broad analysis of the shaping of popular agency in Ireland via the long-term effects of nationalism, the channelling of popular hopes through state-led modernisation and the institutionalisation of self-organisation, with particular attention to the unresolved issues of "carceral Catholicism" in the South and war in the North. Discussing left parties, unions, community activism and social movements, the paper explores Ireland's "Piven and Cloward" moment in the failure of organisational substitutionalism through electoralism, social partnership, clientelism and populism. If modernisation and social partnership together represented a form of passive revolution, constructing a new hegemony in the wake of the collapse of nationalist autarky, the underlying relations constructed in this period seem remarkably unshaken by state withdrawal from this programme. In this context it argues that casual reference to counter-hegemony as a simple collection of moments of cultural opposition is a wilful misunderstanding of the problem, politically and intellectually, and that the real challenge is to construct a coherent alternative which has the capacity of becoming hegemonic in its turn in both these dimensions. Given this analysis of the context of Irish movement activity, what can or should organisers do, in the historically new situation created after the end of the "Celtic Tiger"? The paper argues that simple alliances between the leaderships of organisations which in practice privilege their engagement with existing institutional arrangements over popular self-organisation will not be enough, and explores the outcomes of attempts at alliance-building in three arenas: unions, social movements and community groups; electoral politics; and street protest.