Racial formation and the gendered grammar of belonging: Ireland's citizenship debate twenty years on: A conversation with Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain

Introduction

Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain (RKOR) is a professor of sociology at Maynooth University with research interests in globalisation, Japanese and Korean popular culture, emotions and technology, racial and ethnic beauty pageants, interracial marriage, and multi-racial identities. She has written extensively on immigration, racialisation practices, and the racialised politics of the census in the Republic of Ireland. In the following dialogue, she returns to her impromptu presentation at the Symposium held in Trinity College Dublin in October 2024 to mark the 20th anniversary of the citizenship referendum. Her talk on the day examined the intersections of race and national identity in contemporary Ireland and she situated the processes of racialisation in Ireland within the lived experience of those marked as perpetual outsiders.

In this conversation, she reflects on her family's experience of the referendum, recalling how it reactivated their positioning within the public imagination as migrant interlopers, whose presence required justification, subject to renewed observation in ordinary settings and within public institutions. She also addresses the persistence of anti-Asian hostility, noting the automatic presumption that Asian individuals are either tourists or temporary students who are never recognised as part of the national social fabric. Prof. King-O’Riain extends this discussion by placing the everyday affective and relational dimensions of racialisation at the centre of sociological enquiry. The dialogue foregrounds how Ireland's post-referendum landscape continues to produce conditional forms of belonging for racialised communities, even as the nation presents itself as increasingly diverse and outward-looking. By drawing together public discourse and scholarly reflections, which are informed by her personal experience, the conversation informs the ways in which racial boundaries are maintained through ordinary interactions and institutional practices. It contributes to ongoing debates within Irish sociology concerning the negotiation of citizenship and belonging in a society that, though formally post-colonial, remains structured by enduring processes of racialisation and exclusion.

Note: This interview was conducted via Zoom on 9th April 2025 and has been edited for length and clarity.

Eve Doran (ED):

One of the symposium's core themes was the tightening of Irishness through the 2004 referendum and the effects that followed. I would like to follow up on some of your ideas on the day. Could you speak to that shift and how it impacted your own research?

RKOR:

My interest has always been in how racialisation operates through the state. The state is not neutral. It defines what counts as race, who gets racialised, and under what institutional regimes. My starting point is Omi and Winant's concept of racial formation. ¹ What they call racial projects emerge at micro and macro levels, then become embedded over time into structures that become naturalised. These processes are not always visible. They become embedded in systems – education, welfare, border control – and are treated as normative. We stop recognising them as racial because they appear routine and part of the everyday.

Take schools. Most primary school teachers in Ireland are white. ² That is not a coincidence. It is not simply personal bias among selectors. It is a structural outcome. The rule that you must pass Irish to become a primary school teacher excludes large numbers of people, especially those who arrived after the age of twelve. If you did not take Irish in school, you are effectively disqualified unless you pursue private tuition. That rule, though framed in linguistic terms, functions as a racial filter.

Beverly Tatum's work is instructive here. In her book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, ³ she writes about teachers who claim they do not see colour. In Ireland, white teachers echo this, they treat all students the same. The response Tatum gives is incisive: the same as what? That question gets to the nub of the problem because what is being assumed is that everyone should be treated the same as white Irish children. That is the measure of the norm. That is the unspoken baseline against which others are judged.

It is also worth considering how Irish people think about colonisation. There is a kind of affective identification with the colonised, especially Palestinians. The sympathy is genuine, and the analogy is not inaccurate. Irish people did experience dispossession, language loss and cultural erasure. But that history is often used as a form of exemption. Because we were colonised, we cannot be racist. That is the leap involved in such an analogy. But it is not valid. Formerly racialised people can still participate in racial projects. They can administer racial categories through state institutions. They can enforce exclusions. Historical suffering does not prevent contemporary complicity.

ED:

You touched on how whiteness operates as an unmarked norm. In the Irish context, the presumption of whiteness persists even in the face of demographic shifts. Although my work focuses primarily on the Black and African experience in Ireland, the effects of racialisation extend far beyond any single community. Could you speak more specifically about how this has manifested in relation to Asian Irish identities?

RKOR:

Asian Irish is already an enormous category. Even if you take just ‘Chinese Irish’, there is considerable internal diversity – people from Mainland China, from different ethnic groups and dialects, from Malaysia or Singapore, or Taiwan or Hong Kong. You also have people who are ethnically Chinese but grew up in the Philippines or Indonesia. Beyond that are the South Asian communities – Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi – and East Asian people from Japan or Korea, though there are fewer of them. All of these are grouped together as ‘Asian’, but the complexity within those categories is never acknowledged.

Despite the visibility of these communities in Ireland today, the public perception has not kept pace. Asian Irish people are still overwhelmingly seen as immigrants. That assumption shapes even the most mundane interactions. In a taxi, someone might ask, ‘Where are you from?’ and I reply, ‘North Kildare’. Then comes, ‘No, where are you really from?’ I explain that I was born in Chicago. That still is not enough. ‘No, where are you really, really from?’ What they are actually asking is, ‘What race are you?’

As someone who is mixed-race, I usually say, ‘My mother is Japanese, my father was white American’. That is often enough to satisfy the question. But what it reveals is that no matter what you say, the presumption remains: you are not Irish. Even when you hold Irish citizenship, even after living here twenty years and raising your children here, even when your children are playing GAA every weekend and you are on the sidelines like any other parent, the assumption of foreignness remains.

That assumption is culturally deep. The GAA is still a white-coded institution, though it is changing. There are now Nigerian parents, Filipino parents, Japanese mothers on the sidelines. But for many people, what they see when they look at someone like me is still immigrant. Most of my Filipino students are second generation. And for second-generation Filipinos – born here, grew up here, and who may never have even visited the Philippines – that assumption persists. They are still asked, again and again, ‘Where are you from?’ These questions are not always overtly hostile. But they are reminders, every time, that no matter what you say, you are presumed not to belong.

And this question of belonging – who gets to claim Irishness, and who gets affirmed when they do – is not limited to interpersonal encounters. It plays out in state policy as well. When I was claiming child benefit, as mothers do, I began to receive forms every six to eight weeks from the Department of Social Protection in Letterkenny. ⁴ The forms required me to prove that I was still resident in the country and still working. I had been in the same permanent post at the same university for twenty years. My HR department was exasperated with the repeated requests. Eventually, I called the Department. After speaking to several people, one of them admitted that there was a policy: if the mother was not born in Ireland, she would receive these checks automatically. This had nothing to do with migration status. I am a naturalised Irish citizen. But that did not matter. What they were doing was targeting mothers based on country of birth and constantly checking to make sure that they weren’t taking the resources of whatever it is, €140 a month, of social welfare. I pointed out that this practice was likely illegal, that you cannot target people for additional scrutiny based on place of birth or previous nationality. I sent them multiple copies of my Irish passport. Nothing changed. That practice, they told me, was standard.

This is one of the clearest examples I have encountered where race and migration status become blurred at the level of state administration. This is not just about social attitudes; it is bureaucratic racialisation. It is an institutionalised assumption that mothers who were not born in Ireland are suspect, that they may be taking advantage of the system. This is despite the fact that most evidence shows that white Irish people, because they are the overwhelming majority of the population, are also the majority of those receiving and, where it occurs, misusing welfare. ⁵

There was a study published just last week which showed that migrants in Ireland are, on average, more educated and more likely to be working than Irish-born people. ⁶ That is not an accident. The Irish state controls migration through its visa regimes. Most people who migrate to Ireland come through work permits or education systems that already require high qualifications. But the dominant image is the opposite: that people of colour are arriving en masse to take from the state. It is factually wrong, but the belief has become entrenched. And it has become more entrenched since 2004.

The differential treatment of asylum seekers in Ireland – particularly those housed through IPAS [International Protection Accommodation Service] – has itself become racialised. The response to Ukrainian refugees, who are seen as white, culturally proximate, and therefore ‘deserving’, contrasts sharply with the reception afforded to applicants from Nigeria, Georgia, or other non-European states. Homelessness among IPAS residents has been recoded as a racial problem: tents occupied by Black or brown men are cast as inherently suspect, sites of deviance or danger. These men are imagined as a patriarchal threat – not only to Irish women, but to Irish cultural continuity, to economic stability, to social order. Across state policy, public discourse, and everyday interactions, this logic of racial suspicion circulates. And underpinning it, always, is what Beverly Tatum describes as the silent comparator embedded in colour-blind reasoning: ‘the same as what?’ The answer, consistently, is the same as white Irish people.

Since 2020, Asian Irish immigrants have been placed in a very particular situation. The coronavirus pandemic produced a wave of racialisation, especially once Donald Trump began labelling it the ‘Chinese virus’. That language had consequences well beyond the United States. In Ireland, the association between Asian bodies and disease was rapidly taken up. There was a case of an elderly Chinese woman who was pushed into the canal by a group of young white Irish men, who shouted at her to go home. They told her she was responsible for the virus, that she had brought it to Ireland because she was Chinese.

ED:

The story that you mentioned about the child benefit reminded me of Ronit Lentin's work on the rhetoric surrounding mothers at the time of the referendum. ⁷ It returns us to the gendered and racialised logics that shaped both the campaign and its aftermath. The figure of the migrant mother was cast as someone exploiting legal loopholes, while the present discourse, especially in far-right materials, has turned towards a moral panic around so-called ‘unvetted males’. These two constructions seem intimately connected.

RKOR:

Yes. And let's be clear, they are not unvetted. Everyone who comes into Ireland through the international protection system is photographed and fingerprinted. Every person is subject to vetting. There is no grey area there. But the narrative persists. The figure of the unvetted male has become central to public anxiety, especially among those who are receptive to far-right messaging. It is built on a fiction, but it is politically powerful because it taps into older patterns of suspicion.

ED:

And what is remarkable is that anyone who has gone through the Garda vetting process, as I have to become a teacher, knows it is incredibly thorough, even burdensome. It is not something the average person does unless absolutely required. Yet this imagined flood of ‘unvetted men’ is invoked constantly on posters at protests, or online. It has become the shorthand for an unregulated threat.

RKOR:

Exactly. And I think your point about how gender operates here is crucial. Over the past twenty years, the gendering of racial discourse has not remained static; it has bifurcated. On the one hand, there is the migrant woman, always already positioned as hyper-reproductive, having children ‘just’ to gain residency, child benefit, or to anchor herself in the system. The assumption is that she is having multiple children in order to exploit state resources. That image was central to the 2004 campaign. On the other hand, we now have the figure of the migrant man, constructed as a dangerous sexual threat – especially to white women and children. Those two constructions are not mirror images, but they function together to justify an expanded regime of surveillance and exclusion.

Our social welfare system is not the most generous in Europe. ⁸ It is relatively modest but the idea that people are coming here to take advantage of it has become a foundational myth. Women are depicted as coming to reproduce within the system. Men are imagined as arriving in order to enact violence. These narratives are deeply racialised and heavily gendered, and they operate across institutional, media, and interpersonal levels.

If you think about the 2023 riots, they were not only about migration. They were about masculinity. They were triggered, in part, by the reactivation of a stereotype: that migrant men pose a sexual threat. It recalls the Ashling Murphy case, ⁹ where assumptions were made very quickly, without evidence. And that kind of framing, once it takes hold, is very difficult to dislodge. Migrant men are seen as the danger to ‘our women’, while white Irish men are allowed to remain outside this framing. That is how you have people like Conor McGregor, who was found liable in a civil case for sexual assault in a Dublin hotel in December 2018, but who is still being valorised as a national symbol. He is treated as a representative of Irish pride. His popularity is not incidental. It is connected to a fantasy of white, heterosexual, native masculinity that sees itself as embattled and entitled to reclaim what it perceives as ‘lost’ ground.

Figures like McGregor and Trump speak to that fantasy. They promise a return to a time of uncomplicated authority: where men were protectors, women were possessions, and migrants did not belong. This is the ecosystem in which far-right ideologies grow. It is not just about economics. It is about a crisis of gender, whiteness and entitlement. It is about men who feel they have been left behind, structurally and symbolically. And instead of looking to the state that abandoned them, they turn to racial scapegoats. They are not imagining themselves as racist. They are imagining themselves as defenders – of women, of children, of Irishness. ¹⁰ That position feels righteous. But it is also violent. It legitimises exclusion. It fuels street violence. And it allows people to ignore the empirical reality that the very system they claim is being abused by outsiders is failing the majority of its own population. People are still not in education. That's a failure of the state, but it doesn’t get cast that way. It gets cast as ‘our opportunities are taken’ or the Indian software engineer in Google is taking my job but well, when was that ever your job? Did you even apply for that job?

There is a class dynamic at play here alongside race. What is most striking is the depth of entitlement – this conviction not only of belonging, but of deserving privilege. Culturally, there's a well-known trope in Ireland: a local man makes money, builds a big house on the hill, and in the United States that would be celebrated. People would say, ‘That's brilliant, I want that too’. In Ireland, the response is often sceptical. ‘He's a chancer’. The assumption is that something underhanded happened, that brown envelopes were passed. There is a deep cultural tendency toward begrudgery, a suspicion of success. When that suspicion intersects with race, it becomes something else entirely. That's where the far right finds traction. They take the statistic that most migrants are working, or that they are more highly educated than Irish-born people, and twist it into a racial grievance. It becomes not ‘they’re doing well’, but ‘they’ve taken something’. And that is shaped by a postcolonial history in which direct confrontation with power was impossible. You couldn’t strike back at the landlord, so you spat in his soup. That sensibility endures – a kind of subversive independence, which can be admirable, but which also leaves space for ironic distortions.

There's an urban story I hear doing the rounds. Two white Irish men waiting for a bus on Parnell Street overhear two girls speaking in Irish. The men tell them to fuck off back to their own country. These are the same men who might wave an Irish flag with the slogan ‘Ireland for the Irish’, unable to recognise their own language when it is spoken aloud.

ED:

It reminds me of the viral video clip of Darragh Adelaide, a People Before Profit representative, who is Black mixed-race. In the clip, he is confronted by Philip Dwyer, a far-right agitator. Adelaide responds in Irish. Dwyer, of course, does not understand the language. ¹¹

RKOR:

One of my students is from Palestine. When the recent phase of the conflict in Gaza began, he told me how encouraged he felt seeing thousands of people in Dublin marching with Palestinian flags. Even in the sports clubs he played with in small towns, flags would appear on walls or at pitches. He was moved by the fact that people in Ireland seemed to understand, or at least wanted to show sympathy for, what his people were facing. But at the same time, he would find himself treated with suspicion by some of those same people. Because he did not walk into the room and announce that he was Palestinian, he was seen not as a subject of that solidarity but as one more brown male body in a space where such bodies were not welcome. That tension is real. Yes, Ireland is postcolonial. Yes, Irish people overwhelmingly support Palestine rhetorically. But when it comes to the presence of Palestinians in Ireland – as IPAS applicants, as refugees, as neighbours – many do not want them here. The symbolic solidarity does not always translate into recognition or hospitality.

That is why your work is important, Eve. Because the ultimate transgression, in these imaginaries, is not simply the arrival of migrants, it is the possibility of interracial intimacy. The idea that an immigrant might form a relationship, might have children, might become family that is what provokes a deeper anxiety. The spectre of a multiracial child is imagined as the dilution, or even the disappearance, of the Irish race.

Studying mixed-race people is crucial for this reason. Not only because of their own lived experiences, which are deeply significant, but also because their existence unsettles fixed categories. They force the question: who looks Irish, who gets to be Irish, and who is allowed to belong? That question is shifting. We see people like Rhasidat Adeleke representing Ireland internationally, or Emer O’Neill hosting the Saint Patrick's Day parade. These shifts matter but nonetheless every time Rhasidat runs, the racialised abuse begins again. ¹²

In my view, this hatred does not reflect the majority. When people were recently polled about birthright citizenship, seventy percent said they believed it should exist. ¹³ That suggests that public opinion is not as reactionary as it may seem online. But institutional structures have not caught up.

At university, I have Nigerian students who were born and raised here. They speak Irish fluently, with beauty and ease. Yet they are often challenged to pay international student fees because their parents were not citizens, and they themselves are still waiting for naturalisation. Other students will ask, ‘Why don’t you just get your citizenship?’ But these processes are lengthy and difficult. It is not unusual to wait a decade. Ireland's naturalisation process is far more arduous than that of many other European countries. Yet that bureaucratic difficulty is not recognised. Instead, young people – who are Irish in every meaningful way – are treated as outsiders by institutions that still conflate belonging with ancestry.

ED:

The laws are incredibly rigid, yet there is this widespread belief that Ireland's immigration system is lax, and that our social welfare is the most generous in Europe. This kind of misinformation seems to have taken hold and been amplified by figures like McGregor, as you mentioned earlier, and other agitators connected to the US. There's a historical thread here too. McGregor was recently a guest of honour at the White House. And thinking of that in light of Noel Ignatiev's work on the historical whitening of the Irish in America, ¹⁴ do you think we’re seeing Irish Americans reassert that whiteness?

RKOR:

Absolutely. What you’re describing – what McGregor represents, and what Trump represents too – is not just whiteness. It's a specific version of retro masculinity, and it's deeply racialised and gendered. It's the fantasy of men as men, women as passive or property, and the erasure of anything outside a rigid binary. There's no space in that worldview for transgender people, or for any idea of gender fluidity. And it's no surprise that both McGregor and Trump are facing multiple allegations of sexual violence. Trump is now a convicted rapist. McGregor's has faced several claims. ¹⁵ Yet none of this troubles the far-right, male-dominated online worlds they inhabit and fuel. In fact, it enhances their appeal. Because they are strongmen. They say the things which can’t be said, and they don’t apologise.

There's a massive vacuum – social, economic, emotional – and Trump and McGregor are what's filling it. Particularly among young white men, often working-class, often from places where the economic future looks bleak. They feel abandoned. And they’ve been told their value lies in being providers and protectors of their women, who are weaker. But structurally, they can’t live up to that. The jobs aren’t there. The housing's not there. The education system's working better for girls now – at least in terms of school outcomes. They’re caught in this contradiction, and rather than interrogating the system that produced it, they’re handed a target: migrants, women, woke culture.

Trump and McGregor speak into that vacuum with absolute clarity. They simplify the world, reduce it to enemies and threats. They’re masters of social media. There's no filter. No institutional language. Just directness, aggression, dominance. And it works. It worked in the United States. It's working here. And now that the US economy is faltering again, particularly in the South, I’m curious to see what happens. Because when those same working-class communities begin to feel the impact of plant closures, when the car factories shut down in Tennessee or Georgia, when people start losing their jobs and livelihoods, who will they blame?

Trump has the answer ready. It won’t be the corporations. It won’t be the trade policies. It’ll be Biden. Or the migrants. Or China. That's the brilliance – and the danger – of that rhetoric. It's not just nationalism. It's manifest destiny all over again. The idea that white America has the right to expand, to dominate, and even to annex. He joked about buying Greenland, but the logic behind it wasn’t a joke.

ED:

It's interesting how everything seems to return to questions of power, to who holds it, who is denied it, and how some seek to reclaim it when they feel it has been withheld socially or economically. One of the recurring strategies is to adopt the position of protector, often couched in paternalistic terms about safeguarding women or children. That logic is not new. The gendering of racial discourse, especially in relation to Black men, has a long history that reaches back to the era of slavery and continues in more covert but equally insidious forms. What strikes me is how often Ireland insists that it was never part of colonialism, or claims that you cannot be racist and Irish. And yet these racialised logics are clearly present.

RKOR:

That is exactly what many of my students describe, especially Black male students. After the riots in 2023, the university sent out a campus-wide email saying that anyone feeling unsafe should contact security. Several students came to me to say that security would be the last person they would call. They do not trust them. Security officers frequently target them, not for any actual wrongdoing but for doing ordinary things like playing music, gathering in small groups, or hanging out in shared spaces. One of my students said that if he and his friends are out on campus at night, just talking and listening to music, someone will call it in. Yet if a large group of white students does the same, it is seen as harmless. That double standard is normalised. The issue is not only race but also how race intersects with perceptions of masculinity and group behaviour. A few Black students gathered together can be perceived as threatening, even if they are doing exactly what their white peers are doing. Once again, whiteness is treated as the baseline of what is acceptable, of what needs no explanation or justification. That is how the normativity of whiteness works.

And even in universities, where we often congratulate ourselves on being diverse or inclusive, the underlying structures remain white. I teach in a classroom where over ten percent of my students are Black. It is a genuinely multicultural space. But that does not mean the institution has rid itself of white frameworks of authority and suspicion. All of this has its roots in how Irishness was redefined in 2004. When the state decided that citizenship would be based not on birth or residence but on ancestry, it installed whiteness as the standard of belonging. Irish passport applications are now through the roof, especially from third-generation Irish Americans. Many of them have no lived connection to Ireland. They get the passport in order to move freely in Europe, and some land not in Dublin but in Berlin or Amsterdam. Meanwhile, I have students born and raised in Ireland, fluent in Irish, steeped in Irish culture, who still face barriers to citizenship. A Nigerian student born here after 2004 to non-citizen parents is still treated as non-Irish, regardless of how embedded he is in the society. That is what the referendum has done. It linked citizenship to whiteness by tying it to ancestral connection, rather than lived presence or cultural belonging.

I have also seen this play out in relation to Black Lives Matter. For Japanese Americans like myself, the movement resonates in a very specific way. My own mother was interned in a camp during World War II. ¹⁶ She was forcibly detained because of her race, not because of anything she did. So there is a strong collective memory among Japanese Americans about what racial targeting looks like and how quickly a society can turn.

Here in Ireland, I was genuinely surprised by the diversity of the marches. Black Lives Matter brought out not just Black Irish communities but also many young Asian people. The Asian and Black communities in Ireland have historically been small and quite separate. But I have noticed increasing collaboration between them, especially on political issues. That solidarity matters. You saw it clearly outside the US Embassy in Dublin, where Black and Asian Irish people came together to protest. Their experiences are not identical, but they both encounter the Irish state through a racialised lens. That shared positioning has created new spaces of alliance. It may not be loudly proclaimed, but it is active and growing. That is one hopeful development amidst all the exclusions.

ED:

That is important, and I think it was also reflected in the symposium and the diversity of the speakers and contributors to this special issue.

RKOR:

The other thing we need to keep in mind is that while the referendum turnout appeared high, the actual percentage of the population that voted was relatively low. Around forty percent of eligible voters determined the outcome for everyone else. Yes, many people went out to vote, but if you look closely, I don’t think the complexities of what was being proposed were fully understood. It would be very interesting to run a poll today and ask the same questions, especially now, as we’re on the brink of another recession.

Whenever economic conditions tighten, people's anxieties are channelled into resentment. That resentment finds easy targets, and it almost always takes a racialised form. Trump made it acceptable to voice sentiments that would have been unthinkable two decades ago. His rhetoric, and the social permissions it has generated, have emboldened far-right movements globally. As an American, I find that incredibly shameful. I’m shocked by how little resistance there has been, even in the legal realm, to many of the measures his administration pursued. If the United States is going to survive as a democracy, then that democracy is already under profound threat. What happens in the United States never stays confined there. The legitimisation of racial aggression, the consolidation of whiteness around grievance and entitlement, all of that seeps outward. And we are not immune. Ireland has long imagined itself on the periphery, but the centre is already here.