The Birth of the African‐Irish Diaspora: Pregnancy and Post‐Natal Experiences of African Immigrant Women in Ireland

Published date01 December 2008
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2008.00491.x
Date01 December 2008
The Birth of the African-Irish
Diaspora: Pregnancy and
Post-Natal Experiences of African
Immigrant Women in Ireland
Dianna J. Shandy* and David V. Power**
ABSTRACT
This article presents f‌indings from a study of African immigration to Ire-
land. Set against a background description of who these recent immigrants
are and why they come, this research, based primarily in a Dublin mater-
nity hospital, looks at the experiences of pregnant and post-partal African
women to explore questions surrounding use of maternity services and
their relationship to larger issues of integration into Irish society. This gen-
dered segment of the population is of particular interest, as the phenome-
non of Irish-born children to non-national parents has been a lightning
rod issue in immigration debates in Ireland, leading to a June 2004 referen-
dum limiting access to citizenship by birth in unprecedented ways. Ireland,
long a country characterized by emigration, only recently transitioned to a
nation of net immigration, and, as such, is grappling with the implications
of its rapidly changing ethnic make-up in questions of race and racism,
allocation of social welfare entitlements, and effective health and human
services delivery. Through this exploration of the phenomenon of inscrib-
ing immigration debates on African women’s bodies, this article highlights
racism, family reunif‌ication, the right to work, and the lengthy process of
adjudicating immigration claims as signif‌icant obstacles to integration into
Irish society. Through this analysis, this article also provides empirical
data that feed into ongoing debates about the meaning of ‘‘African
diaspora.’’
* Associate Professor of Anthropology, Macalester College, Minnesota.
** Associate Professor, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, University of
Minnesota, Minnesota.
2008 The Authors
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Journal Compilation 2008 IOM
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, International Migration Vol. 46 (5) 2008
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. ISSN 0020-7985
doi:10.1111/j.1468-2435.2008.00491.x
Maternity hospitals in Ireland have been at the center of a maelstrom of
public debate surrounding immigration issues. Central to this contro-
versy has been the principle of jus soli, or the right to citizenship by vir-
tue of being born on Irish soil. This policy emerged as a highly
politicized issue in the mid-1990s when Ireland began to experience a
period of rapid economic growth accompanied by unprecedented levels
of net immigration.
While asylum seekers represent only a minority of immigrants into Ire-
land, some highly publicized cases of African women arriving in Ireland
in the latter stages of pregnancy in conjunction with the jus soli policy
led to what the government and some sectors of the public perceived as
an unacceptably high number of non-nationals (especially asylum seek-
ers) giving birth in Ireland, and subsequently applying for permission to
remain on the basis of having a child who was an Irish citizen (Ruhs,
2004). In the ensuing debates, pregnant women’s bodies and the hospi-
tals that facilitated these births became sites of contestation.
The Irish government responded to the situation with a court case in
2003
1
that determined that non-national parents of children who were
Irish citizens could be deported, and subsequently in June 2004 by pro-
posing a national referendum, eliminating an Irish-born child’s auto-
matic right to citizenship when the parents are not Irish nationals
(Ruhs, 2004). The public passed this referendum on 11 June 2004, with
79 percent in favour, and the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act went
into effect on 1 January 2005.
This article, based on analysis of an interview-based study of 51 Afri-
can-born women who were pregnant or who had recently given birth
at an inner-city Dublin maternity hospital, and supplemented with eth-
nographic research in other settings and review of available literature,
attempts to situate this phenomenon of the Irish-born child debate
within a larger temporal and spatial framework. The focus on African
women, as opposed to a comparison study of the experiences of
women from different global regions, is designed to privilege depth
over breadth by concentrating on a geographically distinct migratory
f‌low.
There is no shortage of media and opinion-based pieces on the topic of
contemporary migration to Ireland; however, there is little systematic
inquiry based on empirical study, and scant attention to what Africans
themselves have to say about their experiences in, and motivations for,
120 Shandy and Power
2008 The Authors
Journal Compilation 2008 IOM

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