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Racism in the Irish Experience
Ireland's unique position as the only state in the European Union to have been colonised, coupled with the ambivalent experiences of Irish people within the British Empire, means that issues of 'race' in Ireland are overlaid by complex social and historical forces. This book is a unique analysis of the racialisation of Irish identities. The author examines key phases in the historical development of an Irish 'racial' consciousness, including 16th century colonisation and 19th century immigration to America and Great Britain. He then examines the legacy of this relationship, both in terms of the new migration into Ireland and relations with indigenous minorities -- travellers and Irish Jews. Garner explores the problematic links between nationalist ideologies and racism. He assesses the economic, social and political factors framing the experience of minorities in contemporary Ireland, and places these in a broader European context.
320 pages, Paperback
First published December 20, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 22, 2024
Some quotes:
There must be two dimensions to the idea of ‘race’, a set of phenotypes that correspond to the cultural and social activities of the Irish, Myers (1997) stresses this element, contrasting a typical (and unstated) Irish appearance with that of Africans.
‘The term for Satan in Irish is ‘an fear dubh’ (literally the black man). While that for a man who might be described in English as ‘black’ is ‘an fear gorm’ (the blue man). The etymology of these expressions is traceable to the Viking settlement of Ireland as they are taken not from English but from Old Norse. Indeed African prisoners of war were taken by Vikings to Ireland as early as 867 AD. The genealogy of the ‘blue man’ stresses the longstanding nature of Irish contact with black people, and situates Ireland in the mainstream of international trade, shipping and migration patterns long before colonisation impacted the country.’
Further evidence of black peoples presence in Ireland is provided by Hart (2003) who pieces together a picture of 18th century Ireland with one of the largest populations of any European country.
John Beddoes ‘Index of Negrescence’ (first put forward in 1868) claimed to prove that the Irish, particularly those from the West and South, were related to Negroid peoples a strain of argument that has been floating around since the 1840s.
MacDermott’s description of nationalist writer Thomas D’Arcy McGee (1896)..
‘McGee’s countenance was not pleasing, for its decided African caste and woolly hair... this Negro race mark, in Irishmen, I have noticed in 2 or 3 other instances, and I can only attribute it to a probable descent from one of those faithful countrymen of ours whom Cromwell and Henry sent as slaves to the West Indies, and who may be presumed to have married there ladies of African stock’.
Here the racial question mark is erased ambiguously by reference to the narrative of oppression. The ‘not pleasing’ result is seen as a form of branding in the bloodline.
Edmund Campion’s description of Gaelic Irish encapsulates his duality in the colonizers eyes ‘clear men they are of skin and hue, but of themselves careless and bestial’ (HIstory of Ireland 1633).
Morton (1839:16) claimed that the Celt’s ‘physical traits’, moral character and ‘peculiar customs’ had undergone little change since the time of Caesar; before going on to describe the natives of the south west of Ireland, whose ‘wild look and manner, mud cabins and funeral howlings recall the memory of a barbarous age’.
Dr Tuthill...’I remember, when in the County Galway being very much struck by the copper coloured skins of the inhabitants, especially about the Connemara Mountains. Their long straight hair...’
Engels -’Whenever a district is distinguished for especial filth and especial ruinousness, the explorer may safely count upon meeting chiefly those Celtic faces which one recognises at the first glance as different from the Saxon physiognomy of the native {English}’.
Whilst the idea of what constitutes looking ‘Irish’ is not often made explicit, we can guess that it corresponds to terms such as ‘white’ and ‘European’ in popular thought.
Moreover the Irish scarcely differed from their colonisers, or at least that is the picture emerging from the type of account that stresses cultural difference.
Statutes forbade mixing between the English by blood’ and the ‘mere Irish’ as early as 1297 (BOyce, 1991: 30-1)
MIgration and intermarriage (regardless of the structural relationships governing the individuals) have meant that genetically, the Irish, like other Europeans, have no absolute racial boundary, any more than any other nation.
Bernstein’s examination of the 1863 New York draft riots (1990) points out the ferocity of Irish antipathy to black people in terms of perceived labour competition, political rivalry and sexual anxieties within a multi ethinic urban setting (all themes touched on by Miller, 1969).
Irish as labour in Britain... cheap labour... in mining and textiles.
The role of Irish soldiers in removing Native Americans from their land and killing them is thus a parallel one to that of the English and Scots in 16th and 17th century Ireland leading to the ambivalence over identification with cowboys and for Indians...It also has echoes in the relations between Europeans and Australian Aboriginals and Maoris where dispossession was also carried out with Irish involvement.
Jeffrey (1996b) argues that levels of enlistment in the British armed forces always had more to do with economic opportunities than ideological affiliation to empire, or later to Irish nationalism.
The picture emerging from 17th century texts studied by Beckles is that planters were extremely fearful of Irish-African alliances and Irish allegiance to Catholic European powers, and this anxiety led them as far as to request the reduction or elimination of the supply of labour from Ireland at a time when such labour was still relatively important (that is until the 1680s) and a shortfall still existed... after 1834 indentured labourers from India were recruited to fill the plantation labour force.
Coughlin comments that the Irish terrain in Spenser is ‘ mostly composed of dark and impenetrable forests, mountains and bogs, threatening places among which a savage and implacable enemy fleetingly appears and disappears (1989b:53). The response to the uncivilised landscape mirrors the situation to the problem of the uncivilised people: obliteration. Irenius in The View (1633:64) suggests cutting down and opening all paces through woods, so that a wide space of 100 yards might be laid open in every of them for the safety of travellers’. The voice of Spenser thus echoes through Hausmann’s clearance of mid-nineteenth-century Paris, designed to make barricading narrow streets no longer viable and enabling greater levels of social control and mobility for security forces.
It would be accurate to say the most racism in the Irish context derives from English colonial practice, just as it would be to argue that the Irish have ‘appropriated’ racism as a postcolonial instrument of domination.
....the idea that these minorities have a number of negative impacts on the host society, competition for diminishing welfare resources, a drop in education standards, the spread of illness, an increase in trafficking of drugs and prostitution, higher levels of crime and insecurity (particularly in urban centres).
The Protestant Constitution... the concept that every event was evidence of God’s plan, including Britain’s imperial dominance, while disasters were forms of punishment for poor collective behaviour.
Even Argentinian Che Guevara’s ...grandmother was ...from the West of Ireland.
There must be two dimensions to the idea of ‘race’, a set of phenotypes that correspond to the cultural and social activities of the Irish, Myers (1997) stresses this element, contrasting a typical (and unstated) Irish appearance with that of Africans.
‘The term for Satan in Irish is ‘an fear dubh’ (literally the black man). While that for a man who might be described in English as ‘black’ is ‘an fear gorm’ (the blue man). The etymology of these expressions is traceable to the Viking settlement of Ireland as they are taken not from English but from Old Norse. Indeed African prisoners of war were taken by Vikings to Ireland as early as 867 AD. The genealogy of the ‘blue man’ stresses the longstanding nature of Irish contact with black people, and situates Ireland in the mainstream of international trade, shipping and migration patterns long before colonisation impacted the country.’
Further evidence of black peoples presence in Ireland is provided by Hart (2003) who pieces together a picture of 18th century Ireland with one of the largest populations of any European country.
John Beddoes ‘Index of Negrescence’ (first put forward in 1868) claimed to prove that the Irish, particularly those from the West and South, were related to Negroid peoples a strain of argument that has been floating around since the 1840s.
MacDermott’s description of nationalist writer Thomas D’Arcy McGee (1896)..
‘McGee’s countenance was not pleasing, for its decided African caste and woolly hair... this Negro race mark, in Irishmen, I have noticed in 2 or 3 other instances, and I can only attribute it to a probable descent from one of those faithful countrymen of ours whom Cromwell and Henry sent as slaves to the West Indies, and who may be presumed to have married there ladies of African stock’.
Here the racial question mark is erased ambiguously by reference to the narrative of oppression. The ‘not pleasing’ result is seen as a form of branding in the bloodline.
Edmund Campion’s description of Gaelic Irish encapsulates his duality in the colonizers eyes ‘clear men they are of skin and hue, but of themselves careless and bestial’ (HIstory of Ireland 1633).
Morton (1839:16) claimed that the Celt’s ‘physical traits’, moral character and ‘peculiar customs’ had undergone little change since the time of Caesar; before going on to describe the natives of the south west of Ireland, whose ‘wild look and manner, mud cabins and funeral howlings recall the memory of a barbarous age’.
Dr Tuthill...’I remember, when in the County Galway being very much struck by the copper coloured skins of the inhabitants, especially about the Connemara Mountains. Their long straight hair...’
Engels -’Whenever a district is distinguished for especial filth and especial ruinousness, the explorer may safely count upon meeting chiefly those Celtic faces which one recognises at the first glance as different from the Saxon physiognomy of the native {English}’.
Whilst the idea of what constitutes looking ‘Irish’ is not often made explicit, we can guess that it corresponds to terms such as ‘white’ and ‘European’ in popular thought.
Moreover the Irish scarcely differed from their colonisers, or at least that is the picture emerging from the type of account that stresses cultural difference.
Statutes forbade mixing between the English by blood’ and the ‘mere Irish’ as early as 1297 (BOyce, 1991: 30-1)
MIgration and intermarriage (regardless of the structural relationships governing the individuals) have meant that genetically, the Irish, like other Europeans, have no absolute racial boundary, any more than any other nation.
Bernstein’s examination of the 1863 New York draft riots (1990) points out the ferocity of Irish antipathy to black people in terms of perceived labour competition, political rivalry and sexual anxieties within a multi ethinic urban setting (all themes touched on by Miller, 1969).
Irish as labour in Britain... cheap labour... in mining and textiles.
The role of Irish soldiers in removing Native Americans from their land and killing them is thus a parallel one to that of the English and Scots in 16th and 17th century Ireland leading to the ambivalence over identification with cowboys and for Indians...It also has echoes in the relations between Europeans and Australian Aboriginals and Maoris where dispossession was also carried out with Irish involvement.
Jeffrey (1996b) argues that levels of enlistment in the British armed forces always had more to do with economic opportunities than ideological affiliation to empire, or later to Irish nationalism.
The picture emerging from 17th century texts studied by Beckles is that planters were extremely fearful of Irish-African alliances and Irish allegiance to Catholic European powers, and this anxiety led them as far as to request the reduction or elimination of the supply of labour from Ireland at a time when such labour was still relatively important (that is until the 1680s) and a shortfall still existed... after 1834 indentured labourers from India were recruited to fill the plantation labour force.
Coughlin comments that the Irish terrain in Spenser is ‘ mostly composed of dark and impenetrable forests, mountains and bogs, threatening places among which a savage and implacable enemy fleetingly appears and disappears (1989b:53). The response to the uncivilised landscape mirrors the situation to the problem of the uncivilised people: obliteration. Irenius in The View (1633:64) suggests cutting down and opening all paces through woods, so that a wide space of 100 yards might be laid open in every of them for the safety of travellers’. The voice of Spenser thus echoes through Hausmann’s clearance of mid-nineteenth-century Paris, designed to make barricading narrow streets no longer viable and enabling greater levels of social control and mobility for security forces.
It would be accurate to say the most racism in the Irish context derives from English colonial practice, just as it would be to argue that the Irish have ‘appropriated’ racism as a postcolonial instrument of domination.
....the idea that these minorities have a number of negative impacts on the host society, competition for diminishing welfare resources, a drop in education standards, the spread of illness, an increase in trafficking of drugs and prostitution, higher levels of crime and insecurity (particularly in urban centres).
The Protestant Constitution... the concept that every event was evidence of God’s plan, including Britain’s imperial dominance, while disasters were forms of punishment for poor collective behaviour.
Even Argentinian Che Guevara’s ...grandmother was ...from the West of Ireland.
January 25, 2023
There has been lots of attention to race in Ireland and Irish America in recent times, but this seems to be one of the earliest books to look at that picture, so for that alone I give it 4 stars. Most interesting is that racist prejudice against non-white and non-Christian communities actually decreased in Ireland between the 1970s and into the late 1980s, which is well before the arrival of substantial numbers of immigrants of color into Ireland with the economic boom of the 1990s. Very informative social history
October 6, 2026
i'll be fascinated to see the work that's continued around this topic in the past 23 years, 21 of which I've been living in Ireland. it tips over a bit on the dense and repetitive side of academic writing, but it's a facet of social history that I've not heard much in casual conversation all my life here - the relationship between white supremacy and Irish nationalism, and meanwhile the tightrope between colonized and privileged that Ireland is still on today. there's quite an abyss to fall into; I can see why people here tiptoe
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews