2026/03/10 by Philomena Mullen
Social Sciences · #Diaspora, migration, transnational identity #Interdisciplinary Cultural and Social Studies #Irish and British Studies
paper · doi:10.1177/07916035261429379
openalex publication_date 2026/03/10 · openalex created_date 2026/03/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.