AFTER OPTIMISM?: IRELAND, RACISM AND GLOBALISATION.

We would like to dedicate the book to all those Irish children who find themselves in a new limbo, remaining 'part of the nation' while being denied Irish citizenship.The Proclamation of 1916 promised to 'cherish all of the children of the nation equally'.The 'birthright' of all Irish-born children is still protected without shame or irony by Bunreacht na hÉireann and the Good Friday Agreement yet this has been rendered effectively valueless by the Citizenship Referendum and subsequent legislation.The Irish state was able to strip some of its most vulnerable children of citizenship with the support of 80 per cent of the population.This reality is at the very core of the racism that we confront in 21st century Ireland.Racism National Anti-racism Awareness Programme, the Social Inclusion Unit at the Department of Family, Community and Social Affairs.Second, state-funded equality and anti-racism bodies such as the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI), the Equality Authority, and the Human Rights Commission.Third, broadly based migrant-support NGOs, funded by state, EU and private sources such as the Irish Refugee Council, the Immigration Council of Ireland (ICI) and the Migrants Rights Centre of Ireland (MRCI).Fourth, churchfunded refugee support organisations such as SPIRASI -Asylum Services Initiative, the Vincentian Refugee Centre, the Refugee Service of the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace and the Jesuit Refugee Service.Fifth, migrantand minority-led groups, privately or EU-funded, such as the Irish Traveller Movement, Pavee Point, Integrating Ireland, ARASI, the Africa Centre, the African Women's Network (AkiDwA).And sixth, community development projects and refugee and Traveller support groups throughout Ireland.For all of these organisations, the moment of optimism goes on in the shape of funds, jobs, roundtables, meetings, seminars, reports.Indeed, the Irish 'race relations (interculturalism) industry' has integration rather than anti-racism as its main objective and all the organisations tend to walk the 'interculturalism' walk and talk the 'diversity' talk (see Lentin, 2002).For us, however, the moment of optimism has passed, forcing us towards a new analysis that can make sense of racism in the context of a new matrix of questions and issues -the central role of the state, Ireland's prime position in an increasingly globalised world, the importation of migrant labour to maintain Ireland's increasing economic prosperity and the generation of new racialised categories that need to be controlled and regulated.This end to optimism was symbolised through the enacting of an increasingly draconian immigration regime -culminating in the Citizenship Referendum and the Immigration Act 2004.In our Racism and Anti-racism in Ireland, we argued that something ominous was happening in Irish society at the turn of the millennium, as racism was moving from the margins to the centre of Irish political life.In our introduction to that book, we analysed the specificities of racism in Ireland, laying out our conceptualisation of race and racism.Moreover, stressing racism as a lived experience through contributions from the racialised, we asked how it was possible 'that racism was becoming normalised in Ireland' and noted that racism in Ireland was organised not by extreme right groups, but by 'ordinary journalists, politicians and writers' (Lentin and McVeigh, 2002: 2).The present post-optimism book shifts to putting the racial state as well as globalisation at the centre of our analysis.This chapter presents our theoretical argument.We begin by sketching what appears to be the contradiction of Irish state racism between its anti-immigration and 'managing diversity' policies.In fact this turns out not to be a contradiction at all, once we put forward our dual theoretical proposition, that Ireland is turning from what Goldberg (2002) calls a 'racial state', to a biopolitical racist state.The concepts 'racial state', 'racist state' and 'biopower' inform our analysis and run through the book, as do the links we make between state, racism and globalisation. Notes to Chapter Four1 According to Cunningham et al (2005), the great majority of permits issued were to East Europeans and white South Africans, further illustrating the racial preferences of both state and employers.2 In line with the practice of employing non-EU workers for below the minimum wage, in September 2005, Irish Ferries announced it plans to make more than 500 workers redundant replacing them with staff on lower pay.The company's plans to re-flag its ships met with government opposition (Beesly, 2005).3 The European Economic Area (EEA) consists of the EU, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. 4 Interestingly, during the run up to the 2005 British elections, where the two main parties competed as to which would exert firmer control over asylum and immigration, Conservative leader Michael Howard claimed during a BBC interview that Ireland had responded to the enlargement of the EU by drastically reducing -from 50,000 to 2,500 -the number of work permits granted each year to non-EU nationals.A spokeswoman for the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment expressed surprise at Mr Howard's assertion, and said there were no limits on work permits, and that there had been no change of policy (Millar, 2005).5 The six non-EU countries with most migrants employed on work permits in Ireland were the Philippines, Ukraine, Romania, South Africa, Brazil, China and India (Ruhs, 2005: 45).6 See the Department of Social and Family Affairs web-site for details of the habitual residency condition http://www.welfare.ie/publications/hrc.html.7 These are periodically updated at the DETE website.8 This list is available and updated online at the DETE website under the heading 'companies issued with permits', where it is downloadable as an excel file.It is periodically updated through the year.Brodkin, Karen.1998.How Jews became White Folk and What That Says about Race in America.