“Everyone with Eyes Can See the Problem”: Moral Citizens and the Space of Irish Nationhood
| Published date | 01 August 2007 |
| Date | 01 August 2007 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2007.00411.x |
| Author | Anwen Tormey |
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.,
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© 2007 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2007 IOM
International Migration Vol. 45 (3) 2007
ISSN 0020-7985
* PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
“Everyone with Eyes Can See
the Problem”: Moral Citizens
and the Space of Irish Nationhood
Anwen Tormey*
ABSTRACT
This paper examines Ireland’s 2004 Constitutional Amendment which removes
birthright citizenship from any future Irish-born children of immigrant parents.
I argue that for particular historical reasons, the ability of the state to convince
its citizens of the necessity for this Amendment was remarkable and I sug-
gest that it was able to do so by constructing citizenship as a moral regime
and foreign-nationals and their foetuses as ‘suspect patriots.’ I describe how
the notion of immorality is laminated upon black bodies – specically black
pregnant women – and how the presence of black migrant workers, refugees
and asylees consequently comes to be experienced in Irish national space as
transgressive, their political subjecthood constrained by the supposedly legible
abjectivity of their bodies. The issue of race remains unenunciated, and yet,
as the Minister for Justice stated during the referendum debate, ‘anyone with
eyes can see the problem.’ The Irish government’s privileging of moral rather
than cultural incommensurability is strikingly similar to culturalist rhetorics of
exclusion that are often invoked when race is at issue in European public debate
on immigration. Congured upon, and therefore experienced as a type of body,
immorality becomes an alibi for race and is naturalized as a form of exclusion
and as a potential site of state intervention in the form of xenophobic legislation
and policymaking. Reading this decision as merely racist however, fails to give
voice to the experiences of Irish Citizens who voted for this Amendment. Their
struggle to build a “New Ireland” and to accept a multiculturalist framework
in the face of neo-liberal restructuring policies and a European-wide retreat
from the welfare state must be considered as being in dialectical tension with
the ideological smearing of immigrants if we are to fully grasp the complex
interaction between relations of power and the privileging of difference.
70 Tormey
© 2007 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2007 IOM
RACIAL IMAGINARIES AND ‘PRAXES OF BELONGING’
1
?
THE SPACE AND BODY POLITIC OF A NATION
What this referendum seeks to do therefore, is to insert a claim into the heart
of the Irish ethos to the effect that no rmal principles of citizenship can be
suspended in the case of those who are not properly ‘one of us’. It tells people
in the starkest terms (rendered more stark because of the intentional choice to
amend the Constitution) that we do not wish them to know a sense of belonging.
It says that our land is under no circumstances to be a land of new starts and fresh
chances but rather that genetic connection to the pure Irish race is a necessary
prerequisite of Irishness
Dr. Neville Cox, Trinity Law School, Dublin (Cox, 2004: 58)2
I’m so embarrassed by all these pregnant black women – they’re everywhere!
Lucinda, asylum-seeker from Ghana and mother of an Irish-born child.3
The phrase “beyond the Pale” has become so integrated into the English language
that its origins are now obscure. Some scholars believe that the phrase derives
from the name given to the area around Dublin fortied by the English crown
in 1488 to protect the locus of its colonial power in Ireland (Walter, 2001). Over
time, the space of the Pale came to represent the civilizing qualities of English
colonialism and those who inhabited this space were thought to embody this
virtue, just as those who subsisted beyond the Pale were marginalized as the
ungovernable product of a landscape yet in the thrall of nature.
In the Irish Republic that succeeded British rule in 1921, the seat of government
was constitutionally required to remain in Dublin, within the historic contours of
the Pale. The material presence of state buildings testies to a spatial geography
of political power that continues to accrete in the spaces of Ireland’s capital city,
Dublin. In a less tangible sense perhaps, the imagined isomorphism between this
powerful social space of the nation, and the appropriate subject-bodies that can
inhabit this space, also continues into the present. Dublin then, is both a real and
an imaginary space. A potent imaginary, this conation of people and territory is
encouraged by Ireland’s island geography, a feature which was heavily exploited
by nationalist advocates following independence (Castles, 1998; Gibbons, 1996).
In legislative terms, it is reected by the concept of jus soli – or birthright citizen-
ship – and the centrality of this concept in Irish nationality law is understood to
reect a combination of British inuence and a territorial conception of the Irish
people (Ryan, 2005: 192). Constructed over generations, the production of this
space of inclusion and exclusion is, as David Harvey notes, “as much a political
and moral as a physical fact” (Harvey, 2000). And, while the people and spaces
beyond the historic borders of the Pale have been differentially incorporated over
71
Everyone with eyes can see the problem
© 2007 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2007 IOM
time, there remains a sense in which the ‘power geometry’ of the Pale – particu-
larly the urban space of Dublin – still functions as a metaphoric locus and limit
of the national body politic and its territory.
For the past decade however, the presence of immigrants in Ireland has served
to contest the self-evident connectedness between the social spaces of the na-
tion and the kinds of bodies that are tacitly imagined – politically, historically,
but also racially – to rightfully belong in these spaces. The submerged nature of
this spatialized understanding was abruptly exposed in March 2004 when the
government proposed a referendum to amend the Irish Constitution and remove
birthright citizenship from the Irish-born children of foreign-national parents in
order to curtail perceived abuse of Irish citizenship law by these parents giving
birth in Ireland. Given Ireland’s history of colonialism and emigration, and the
symbolic resonance its territory has traditionally held in the nationalist imagina-
tion,4 the proposal to move away from jus soli was signicant. It was particularly
so since the government had, with the January 2003 Lobe decision, successfully
convinced the Supreme Court that the birth of an Irish citizen child did not prevent
the state from deporting its non-Irish national parents, even if this had the effect
of forcing the deportation of Irish children from the state.5 Despite this consider-
able legislative victory in preventing ‘citizenship abuse,’ the government went
on to argue that it was further necessary to amend Article Nine of the Constitu-
tion and shift the basis of Irish citizenship from its historical focus on birth to a
combination of descent (jus sanguinas) and naturalization (jus domicili). In June
2004, the Twenty-Seventh Amendment to the Irish Constitution was passed with
an overwhelming (approx. 70%) approval rate from Irish citizens.6
This paper explores the question of how the Irish government persuaded its citi-
zens of the necessity to enact this momentous change to its citizenship regime. I
argue below that it was able to persuade its citizens by emphasizing citizenship
as a moral regime and constructing foreign-nationals and their future children
as ‘suspect patriots’ throughout its pro-Amendment campaign.7 In so doing, the
government combined two compelling themes of progressive liberal multicultur-
alism; namely, rationality and morality. While this strategy left the issue of race
unspoken, as I explain below, the Irish experience of racial difference remained
a seminal affective force in this decision.
In the silence surrounding the issue of race, the government’s pro-Amendment
discourse inserted concepts such as “moral sensibility” and “moral obligation”,
and these began to frame much of the emergent conversation about who could
be Irish, and what the limits of Irish liberal multiculturalism can, and should,
be. I suggest that, in one sense, these governmental “praxes of belonging” were
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