The coloniality of citizenship: Reflections on the 2004 citizenship referendum

Abstract

This article re-theorises the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, in first theorising ‘Ireland’ as a 32-counties occupied territory spread over two racial states, and as Britain's first colony. Second, the article theorises citizenship as a badge of social subjection and a measure of standing exclusively granted by racial states. Unpicking the meaning of citizenship, the article explores the impact of coloniality on the reconstruction of Irish citizenship as white supremacy. Third, the article proposes that the Citizenship Referendum resulted from the postcolonial Irish bourgeoisie wishing to emulate England, rather than continue to rebel against the ongoing British colonisation of Ireland. In conclusion, I follow McVeigh and Rolston in proposing that in view of the rise in ‘whiteness riots’ in Ireland north and south, our anti-racism scholarship and activism must re-focus not only on the abolition of the racist citizenship regime, but also aim to end Ireland's unfinished revolution.

Colonialism continues to structure the lived experience of Irish citizens, north and south, in the most profound ways. (McVeigh and Rolston, 2021: 7)

Social exclusion in terms of race … becomes the mark of social belonging, the measure of standing in the nation-state, the badge of social subjection and citizenship. (Goldberg, 2002: 10)

In postcolonial societies, the single party is the modern form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, unmasked, unpainted, unscrupulous, and cynical. (Fanon, 2001 [1963]: 132)

Introduction

In 1996, having reached the ‘migration turning point’, southern Ireland was the last EU member state to become a country of net immigration due to rapid economic growth that created an unprecedented demand for labour across a wide range of sectors and a historically low unemployment rate (Quinn and Ruhs, 2009). According to McVeigh and Rolston (2021), immigration only became a live issue because of the pull factor of Ireland's Celtic Tiger economy as southern Ireland became a country of in-migration, and with migrants of colour, it ‘became conscious of its own whiteness, discovered “diversity” and began to manage migration and integration’. With the 2004 European Union enlargement, the source of labour migration changed significantly and with it the nature of the EU's migration policy. In 2003, after ten years of unprecedented economic growth, Fortress Europe brought down the shutters on non-EU migrants. This shift in the service of western capitalism meant that, although Ireland did accept a large number of labour migrants from the Global South, Irish employers were largely made to give preference to European Economic Area nationals, and low-skilled jobs that had generated the multi-ethnicising of Ireland were now less open to non-EEA nationals. One consequence of these changes in the 26 country Irish labour market was the government's decision to hold a referendum in order to remove the 83 years long constitutional entitlement to citizenship by birth and replace it by granting citizenship only to people born on the island of Ireland who have ‘at least one parent who is an Irish citizen or entitled to be an Irish citizen’. The proposal to change the constitutional entitlement from Jus Soli to Jus Sanguinis citizenship was supported by both the coalition and the main opposition parties, who managed to persuade the electorate that non-EEA migrants were ‘abusing the integrity of Irish citizenship’, and the referendum resulted in a resounding 79.2% yes vote.

I was one of the campaigners for a no vote. Among other things, I co-founded and chaired the Coalition Against the Deportation of Irish Children (CADIC), initiated by AkiDwA – the African and Migrant Women's Network – in response to the deportations of Irish citizen children together with their migrant parents who were deprived of refugee status or permission to remain. I had also written extensively about the racist outcomes of the Citizenship Referendum at the time, considering it ‘a crucial point in turning Ireland from a racial state to a racist state in which citizens are differentiated from non-citizens. It was an act of political brutality presented as a “common-sense” measure’ (Lentin and McVeigh, 2006: 35). In 2006, Robbie McVeigh and I focused on the racialising effect of the referendum, while also pointing out the absurdity of the Referendum outcome:

The (Citizenship) Referendum created a bizarre new category of people who remained ‘part of the Irish nation’ yet have had their right to citizenship removed. These people … remain “part of the nation” as a “birthright” since Article 2 of the Constitution was not amended (in the Good Friday Agreement), but were now deemed to have an “insufficient connection” to the island of Ireland to “qualify” for citizenship … The Irish Republic had consciously and “democratically” become a racist state. (Lentin and McVeigh, 2006: 55)

Revisiting the Citizenship Referendum twenty years later, scholars offer different theorisations, as evidenced by the contributions to this special issue. In their 2021 book Ireland, Colonialism and the Unfinished Revolution, McVeigh and Rolston argue not only that the 26 county Irish immigration policy was influenced by Ireland having been a British colony, but also that southern Ireland's migration policy (which had been influenced by its historical and ongoing relationship with Britain, particularly through the Common Travel Area [gov.uk, 2019], and because migration into Ireland had always been considered a ‘backdoor entry’ into Britain), was in fact dictated primarily by its relationship with the European Union and its migration and labour policies. Apart from being determined by the centrality of British colonialism, southern Ireland's evolving immigration and citizenship laws have also been determined by its integration into the European Union and by centuries of European colonialism.

McVeigh and Rolston write that what became known as ‘the Chen case’ – the case of a Chinese woman residing in Britain who chose to have a baby in the north of Ireland and who won a European Court recommendation to be allowed to reside in Britain because she had an Irish citizen child – which became the ultimate reason for holding the Citizenship Referendum, forced a profound change in notions of Irish citizenship and nationality that resulted from the unique nature of Irish nationality and citizenship in the context of the EU. McVeigh and Rolston (2021: 193–194) insist that the EU was central to the process of forcing the Irish to become white and a part of the de facto ‘White Europe’ policy, and that by enacting the results of the Citizenship Referendum, southern Ireland was defining its politics by race.

Mullen's theorisation of the referendum (2024) is also based on race and whiteness, albeit with a different emphasis. Mullen argues that

racialised narratives of migration operate(d) through the collapsing of racial and national categories, constructing the association of blackness with national non-belonging. This conflation enabled the portrayal of Black women's reproduction as a demographic threat, a framing that intensified in the lead-up to the 2004 Referendum.

Focusing on racial self-interest rather than on race as a ‘technology for the maintenance of human difference, the main goal of which is the production, reproduction, and maintenance of white supremacy’ (A. Lentin, 2020: 5), Mullen focuses on Ireland's exclusionary practices in relation to blackness that foreground the persistence of antiblackness within the national imaginaries, all the while limiting the definition of ‘Ireland’ to the 26-county Republic rather than the colonised island of Ireland as a whole.

Acknowledging my then focus on the racialising and racist meanings of the Citizenship Referendum and the ensuing legislation, in this article I aim to revise my theorisation of the referendum in several ways. First, my analysis at the time did not theorise ‘Ireland’ as an occupied territory and as Britain's first colony, a colonisation that served as a blueprint and inspired Britain in its subsequent colonisation projects across the globe, the results of which we are witnessing inter alia in Palestine (see Lentin, 2018 on the racialisation of Zionist settler colonialism). In this article, I treat ‘Ireland’ as a colonised 32-county political entity (McVeigh and Rolston, 2021; Ohlmeyer, 2023; Robinson, 2021 [1983]), spread over two racial states, of which the six counties north remains occupied and colonised by Britain. I propose that the Citizenship Referendum affected both north and south, as McVeigh and Rolston urge us to do in their masterly 2021 book. Second, much of the analysis of the referendum, including Mullen's crucial insistence on its anti-Blackness motivation, emphasises the centrality of citizenship as a signifier of belonging rather than, as Goldberg (2002: 10) reminds us, a badge of social subjection and a measure of standing exclusively granted by racial states. Therefore, building on McVeigh and Rolston, and taking on board Rodríguez's theorisation of the ‘coloniality of migration’ that links racial capitalism with the asylum-migration nexus (2018), this article re-writes my theorisation of the referendum and aims to theorise its implications in terms of Ireland being a British settler colony and an occupied territory. I unpick the meaning of citizenship and explore the impact of coloniality on the re-construction of Irish citizenship as white supremacy. Third, I propose that the Citizenship Referendum was the result of the wish of the postcolonial Irish bourgeoisie to emulate England, rather than continue to rebel against the ongoing British colonisation of Ireland. In conclusion, I follow McVeigh and Rolston in proposing that in view of the rise in ‘whiteness riots’ (Richmond and Charnley, 2022) in Ireland north and south, our anti-racism scholarship and activism must re-focus on confronting not only the abolition of the racist citizenship regime, but also aim to end Ireland's unfinished revolution.

The colonisation of Ireland and the coloniality of migration

Analyses of migration and its interaction with modern racial states and white European societies, even those analyses considering race as a central factor in states’ attempts to prevent migrants from belonging, often tend to occlude the links between migration and colonialism. A classic example of the race and migration policy nexus is the 1991 ‘racism and crisis’ analysis by the French sociologist Etienne Balibar. Before the southern Irish state had reached its ‘migration turning point’, Balibar argued that European racial states, viewing immigration as a ‘problem’, link every social problem – employment, housing, social welfare, schooling, health services, and criminality – to the presence of ‘immigrants’. This leads to the proposal that reducing or ending immigration, and expelling as many migrants as possible, would solve ‘our’ social problems (Balibar, 1991). McVeigh and I utilised Balibar to theorise the racialisation of immigration, and the blame laid by the 26-county Irish state on migrant mothers for ‘the problem of antiquated and overcrowded maternity service, unable to cope with a growing number of births’ (Lentin and McVeigh, 2006: 75) in the lead up to the referendum.

In 1991, Balibar argued that ‘immigration’ had become the name of race, a new name, but one that was linked to historical appellations and that enabled individuals to be classified in a racial typology. Apparently unaware of the racialising implications of his discourse, the then Minister for Justice advised the referendum opponents to ‘keep quiet about race’ and accept the logic of sending home the ‘foreign bodies’ whose presence gave rise to ‘reactions of rejection’ while at the same time be prepared to ‘assimilate those who are assimilable by their nature or their aspirations’ (Balibar, 1991: 218). In 2006, McVeigh and I theorised the Citizenship Referendum as a major turning point in the racialisation of Irishness, despite the insistence by the southern Irish government that neither it nor 80% of the voting population could be dubbed racist. Instead, the government insisted on the logic of the referendum aligning with the ‘integrity of European citizenship’ that, it claimed, took precedence over both the Irish peace process and the birthright of people born in Ireland. However, though cursorily mentioning the colonial roots of racism as a global phenomenon, we did not firmly situate Ireland and the Irish experience within broader analyses of colonialism and imperialism.

In their 2021 book McVeigh and Rolston's wide-ranging analysis does put colonialism front and centre, positioning Ireland as Britain's first colony and settler colony, and, I would add, occupied territory:

whether Ireland was Europe's first colony, Ireland was central to the development of British colonialism and imperialism. It was palpably among the first polities to be colonised and this experience provided a template for later colonialisms. The colonisation of Ireland was central to the development of the ‘greatest empire’ of all. (McVeigh and Rolston, 2021: 67)

Linking colonisation, settlement, and migration, they cite Ferguson (2012), who writes that not only was Ireland ‘the experimental laboratory of British colonization and Ulster … the prototype plantation’, but also that ‘empire could be built not only by commerce and conquest but by migration and settlement’.

Drawing a historical link between colonisation, settlement and migration in the Irish context, Ohlmeyer (2023) reminds us that migration is definitely not a new post-Celtic Tiger phenomenon but was rather a historical feature of colonised Ireland, where waves of migration, colonisation and settlement have formed the population for centuries:

England first invaded Ireland in 1169, which led Friedrich Engels to observe in a letter (1856) to Karl Marx that “Ireland may be regarded as the first English colony.” Colonists followed the conquerors, settling across the island and especially in Munster and Ulster. By the early 18th century, nearly a third of the island's population was of immigrant stock, descendants of 350,000 (mostly Protestant) settlers who had colonised Ireland during the course of the 17th century. The colonists brought with them their English language, fashions, culture, and commercial ways, which parliamentary legislation privileged while outlawing Irish language and dress, together with Irish agricultural, social, political, and cultural practices.

Like McVeigh and Rolston, Ohlmeyer argues that Ireland served as a laboratory for the British empire, but her analysis locates colonialism as a historical rather than a present-day feature of the island of Ireland, which must be thought of as being colonised by the British as long as the north of the island remains occupied by Britain. Though no terra nullius, colonised Ireland was indeed a laboratory for imperial prejudice, later exercised by Britain against Native Americans, aboriginal Australians, and Indians, and Ireland was the training ground for growing English and British imperialism. One notorious example of the lessons the British forces learnt in Ireland is sending some 750 former Black and Tan British auxiliaries to Mandatory Palestine in 1922 after the Irish War of Independence (Glyn, 2022).

After the sword and the law had been utilised, the next British colonial move was forced population movement, replacing the native Irish population with English and Scottish settlers, who, as Ohlmeyer writes, brought their culture and customs with them in an attempt to erase Irish culture and customs. The plantation of British migrant-settlers in Ireland became the key component in a political solution – a modern statist template for settler colonialism that involved the extermination of large sections of the indigenous population, a form of apartheid of confining the natives to their own bantustans, a missionary zeal that would ensure the natives acquire the settlers’ ‘civilised’ customs, ultimately ensuring that England could solve its social problems by exporting them to the Irish colony (McVeigh and Rolston, 2021: 75–85).

This leads me to propose that these colonial strategies were replicated by the southern Irish state's treatment of migrants and refugees through, first, a form of apartheid regime through the establishment of the Direct Provision system (Lentin and Nedeljković, 2021); second, through applying laws to affirm racial exclusions and hierarchies – commensurate with Goldberg's (2002) argument about the law being used as an instrument of racial states; third, through a missionary zeal ensuring the ‘integration’ of migrants into the ‘civilised’ customs of the Irish; and fourth, through delegitimating migrants’ and asylum seekers’ birthing practices – the Citizenship Referendum's declared strategy.

In line with the tendency of academic analyses to minimise the importance of colonialism and imperialism in the Irish context – even though colonialism reduced Ireland in many ways, inter alia from multicultural and multilingual Irish speakers to monolingual speakers of English, and from Irish to ‘west Brits’ – analyses of crucial turning points such as the referendum are often undertaken outside the context of what Rodríguez calls ‘the coloniality of migration’. Using Quijano's (2008) concept of the ‘coloniality of power’, Rodríguez employs media reports about North African migrants allegedly raping white German women in 2015 to argue that several European governments, fearing the reactions of racist white supremacist mobs, introduced new, stricter asylum and deportation laws. Through the analytical framework of the ‘coloniality of migration’ Rodríguez links racial capitalism with the asylum-migration nexus by focusing first on the economic and political links between asylum and migration, and second on how migration and asylum policies produce hierarchical categories of migrants and refugees, producing a nomenclature drawing on an imaginary reminiscent of the orientalist and racialised practices of European colonialism and imperialism. Rodríguez focuses on migration and asylum policies as inherent to a logic of the racialisation of the workforce by first exploring the racial coding of immigration policies within the context of settler colonialism and transatlantic White European migration to the Américas and Oceania in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and second, by discussing migration policies in post-1945 Western Europe.

The link Rodríguez makes between coloniality, migration and racial capitalism leads me to the Black radical theorist Cedric Robinson who, Alana Lentin (2025: 19) writes, began his exploration of the emergence of racialism with European feudalism ‘in order to explain why race as a way of thinking about social and economic relations was already available for extension and readaptation under colonialism and imperialism’. Lentin writes that ‘(Robinson) argues that racialism comes to legitimate and corroborate social organisation as natural’ in feudal times. Rather than withering away with the advance of bourgeois society, as Marx and Engels thought it would, it solidifies to “inevitably permeate the structures emergent from capitalism”. This is racial capitalism’.

In Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Robinson, 2021 [1983]), Robinson firmly posits the colonisation of Ireland, which he views as a foundational event in the development of racial capitalism, in that it enabled expropriation and the creation of a European social hierarchy, including the racialisation of the English working class. State sponsored violence, through the repression of Irish rebellions and the policy of plantation by English and Scottish settlers, integrated Irish territories and people into England's capitalist system through conquest, land seizure, and the imposition of discriminatory economic policies. In the process, Robinson writes, ‘Ireland had been transformed into a dependent sector of the English economy. Such were the historical experiences that informed Irish nationalism in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, and, I would add, until the present, when Ireland is dependent not merely on its former British coloniser, but also on EU capitalism. Furthermore, Robinson argues, the ‘psychic and intellectual characters of the Irish workers who emigrated to England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to complement the labour of the emergent English proletariat were determined to a large extent by these same events’ (Robinson, 2021 [1983]: 38–39), all of which explains the indelible links both between the English and the Irish, and between British colonialism and settlement, and between emigration and immigration.

The Citizenship Referendum, I propose, should therefore be understood not only in the context of the historical and ongoing British colonisation of Ireland and the link between British and Irish migration policies, and not only within the racial capitalism economic logic of having to secure ‘sufficient’ migrant labour to ascertain the continuous growth first of the British economy and later of the southern Irish economy. It should also be contextualised in the state's wish to structure the market supply along racial lines to ensure that Irish people – who, as Ignatiev (1995) argued, had ‘become white’ in the US diaspora – retain white privilege and white supremacy, while denying Irishness to whole sections of the Irish diaspora – black Irish and Irish of colour – but also in the island of Ireland, where, while no longer exclusively white, Irish people, thanks to immigration, are, and have historically been characterised by mestizaje – mixture, due primarily to Ireland's colonial histories.

The coloniality of citizenship: Citizenship as an instrument of the settler colonial racial state, and the referendum as a project of the postcolonial Irish bourgeoisie

My argument about the colonial roots of the 2004 Citizenship Referendum would be incomplete without understanding citizenship beyond being merely a badge of belonging; I unpick it in this section before moving to argue that the referendum was ultimately the work of Ireland's postcolonial bourgeoisie that arguably aimed to reinvent Ireland in the mould of Englishness.

In 2006, Lentin and McVeigh argued that Ireland, like other modern nation states, must be theorised as what Goldberg (2002) terms a racial state where race and state are defined in terms of each other. The racial state is a state of power, asserting control over those within the state and excluding others in order to construct homogeneity. Using constitutions, border controls, the law, policy making, bureaucracies and government technologies such as census categorisations, invented histories and traditions, ceremonies and cultural imaginings, the racial state is defined by its power to exclude and include in racially ordered terms in order to produce a coherent population and keep negatively racialised others out – the ultimate goal of the referendum. In this scheme of things, social exclusion in terms of race becomes ‘the mark of social belonging, the measure of standing in the nation state, the badge of social subjection and citizenship’, and European heritage as racially defined, ‘becomes a modern passport to global access, commercially and recreationally, residentially and geopolitically’ (Goldberg, 2002, 10) – as clearly articulated by the architects of the referendum.

Examining the gendering of the referendum and its historical roots, Luibhéid (2013) reminds us that birthright citizenship that was the rule since the establishment of the southern Irish state – though not included in the Constitution but rather enshrined in law – was based not on birthright but rather on Irish descent at a time of emigration, depopulation and fear that the Irish were a ‘dying race’. Citizenship and immigration laws and practices, Luibhéid writes, are the critical interface in constructing migrant illegality:

citizenship law plays a fundamental role, since only noncitizens are subject to immigration requirements, rules, and enforcements. The very fact of not holding citizenship in a nation-state means that one cannot freely cross the border into that territory but instead becomes subject to that country's immigration laws. (Luibhéid, 2013: 7)

Citizenship is granted by racial states as part of the migration regime which is a ‘site of permissible discrimination designed to meet (racial) state objectives’, and migration and citizenship laws often converge to enhance racial states’ efforts to construct homogeneity, which Goldberg (2002) terms ‘heterogeneity in denial’.

All this means that the citizenship regime is not only an integral part of the state's raciality, but, in the specific Irish case, it is also due to its significance for Irish people in both Irish states, a consequence of the legacy of the colonisation of Ireland, past and present. As McVeigh and Rolston demonstrate, the referendum not only had racial implications, but it had also overridden the agreement between Britain and the southern Irish state in that it prevented British citizens of the north of Ireland from accessing birthright Irish citizenship, despite the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement. Post Brexit the constitutional amendment obtained by the outcome of the Citizenship Referendum

becomes even stranger as it provides a route to European Union citizenship for any ‘British citizen’ – they only have to move to Northern Ireland … (in) denying citizenship to children with Irish nationality as a birthright, yet offering it to children born in Northern Ireland whose parents’ right to be there is determined by the British state. Arguably, after 80 years of formal independence the Irish government had handed a definitive element of its sovereignty back to the British state. (McVeigh and Rolston, 2021: 196)

On the other hand, the EU's institutionalised capitalist position that white European migrants are preferred to ‘third country’ nationals or to former colonials, means that if you let people of colour in you provide them with a route to citizenship, disturbing Ireland becoming white again, thus, ‘whiteness trumps language and historical connectedness and any attempt to acknowledge the legacy of European colonialism’ (McVeigh and Rolston, 2021: 197). The British colonialism link, McVeigh and Rolston argue, is that ‘Irish citizenship only became an issue because of the post GFA resolution to Irish nationality’. At the same time, the change in the citizenship regime forced through the referendum ‘only became a “solution” because of the ability of the two governments to ignore the GFA’. All this clarifies their argument about the European connection of the Citizenship Referendum and strengthens the imperative to stop relating exclusively to the southern Irish state when we speak about ‘Ireland’ and return to thinking of Ireland north and south as one political unit.

Conclusion: Towards finishing the revolution?

Ohlmeyer (2023) writes that ‘just as the Irish were victims of English imperialism, some – Catholics as well as Protestants – actively engaged in the business of empire or served in imperial armies and administrations’. This leads me to wonder about the motives of the southern state political elite in initiating the 2004 referendum and changing its citizenship regime, beyond the obvious racist motivations, vehemently denied by the government.

In The Wretched of the Earth (2001 [1963]), Fanon posits the postcolonial bourgeoisie as a class that emerged after independence largely mimicking the exploitative structures of the colonisers. This ‘native bourgeoisie’ was more concerned with replacing the former colonial powers than with genuine national development or liberation for the majority of the population. Adopting the values, lifestyle, and even the exploitative practices of the former colonial powers, the ruling bourgeoisie sought to replicate the structures of power and privilege, rather than dismantle them. Fanon made this observation of the postcolonial bourgeoisie tending to look towards the former mother country and the foreign capitalists who count on its obliging compliance, without sharing its profits with the people (Fanon, 2001 [1963]: 133), mostly in relation to postcolonial states in Africa. However, based on this observation, I wonder whether, in initiating the Citizenship Referendum, members of southern Ireland's postcolonial bourgeois political class were effectively emulating their former British colonisers while at the same time aspiring to integrate into the European Union and become ‘better Europeans’, serving the interests of capital and remaining within the imperial embrace.

In Inventing Ireland (1996) Declan Kiberd argues that ‘Ireland’ was a British invention, that Irishness was an identity developed by Irish emigrants in the diaspora, and that, despite the copious campaigns to revive the Irish language and Irish culture, in adhering to English language and culture, postcolonial ‘Ireland’ reinvented itself as ‘little England’. Fanon's theorising the postcolonial bourgeoisie as emulating rather than continuing the rebellion against their colonisers might thus not be as far-fetched and speculative as it sounds. Even though, due to its integration into the EU, southern Ireland no longer depends exclusively on the British economy, its immigration policies – due to the Common Travel Area – have historically been built on Britain's immigration policies. One example of this synergy is the Irish 1935 Aliens Act, southern Ireland's first legislation on immigration which provided a legal definition of ‘alien’ and ‘citizen’, creating a binary system based on kinship and ancestral ties, and which was based on the foundations of the British Aliens Act of 1905 (Rashford and McAdam, 2014). Another example is the policy of dispersing asylum seekers both in Britain and in the south of Ireland since 2000. In Britain, the rationale was ‘sharing the burden imposed by asylum seekers’ (Schuster, 2003: 248), and in Ireland the rationale was the burden on accommodation in Dublin, where most asylum seekers tended to reside until the Direct Provision system was introduced in November 1999 (Lentin and McVeigh, 2006: 46).

Ignatiev's (1995) repudiation of whiteness was rooted in his work on Irishness and the story of people for whom whiteness had no meaning who learned its rules and shaped their behaviour to their advantage when they arrived as negatively racialised immigrants in the USA. Following him, McVeigh and Rolston argue that the Citizenship Referendum re-introduced and re-produced Irish whiteness. However, they insist that Irish people are not white and should not think of themselves as white. Whiteness, which was re-produced in the lead up to the Citizenship Referendum and re-affirmed by its results, is a process, not a state; it remains an indication of location within a matrix of power, and is an essentially colonial concept, which has no positive meaning in the context of Irishness (McVeigh and Rolston, 2021: 380). One must question, however, why, despite the racists’ victory in the referendum, the rise in what Richmond and Charnley (2022) call ‘whiteness riots’ against negatively racialised migrants both north and south of the border (e.g., Bakare, 2025; Lentin, 2023) continues apace, following the global rise of the fascist right.

Without succumbing to the discredited concept of ‘miscegenation’, McVeigh and Rolston suggest that Irish people are rather a mestizaje (mixture) of Planter and Gael, coloniser and colonised, native and settler, immigrants and emigrants – all constituted by the island of Ireland's experience of colonialism and imperialism. Looking beyond Ireland, they argue that the white dominion that characterised the post-partition southern state of Ireland always shares the discontents of settler colonialism (McVeigh and Rolston, 2021: 385). For me, Mestizaje is perhaps too facile a conclusion to a long history of colonialism and imperialism – probably because I am finding it hard to theorise Palestine – colonised for centuries, long before the Zionists arrived – as a Mestizo mix of coloniser and colonised, native and settler, though this may be due to my rage in the middle of the Zionist genocide in Gaza.

In the spirit of Robinson's centring of the crucial role of the Black radical tradition in rising against coloniality and empire, McVeigh and Rolston are firm believers in Irish resistance and in the possibility of dismantling partition and finishing the ‘unfinished revolution’, which, they believe, still constitutes Ireland's political horizon. Bearing in mind that the north of Ireland remains a settler colony and a mestiza occupied territory, even though it does not form part of academic analyses of ‘Irish’ immigration and citizenship policies, and although global white supremacy still reigns supreme, decolonisation is the ultimate goal. In Ireland, with the advent of the ‘new Irish’ whose children make Mestizaje much more impossible to ignore twenty years after the referendum – we must continue to believe that decolonisation is about to come despite the racial state's citizenship regime.

However, I feel much less hopeful than McVeigh and Rolston, particularly after living for over 50 years in Ireland, where I was not forced to acquire the Irish language or immerse myself in Irish culture, due to the prevalence of Ireland's ‘little England’ cultural and political practices, including policies of migration and citizenship. That said, I have to admit that in today's Ireland, Polish-Irish, Nigerian-Irish, Lithuanian-Irish, etc., civil servants, politicians, bus drivers, sportspeople, shop assistants, or doctors in both south and north Irish states are in fact creating a Mestizaje space, and effectively rendering the referendum results irrelevant beyond racial state formalities. Our anti-racism activism should not merely be about revoking the 27th amendment of Bunreacht na hÉireann, but should rather be working towards the total abolition of the partition of Ireland, of the Direct Provision regime, of deportations, and ultimately of capitalism, imperialism and settler colonialism.