ABSTRACT
This chapter examines changes in the social and political make-up of Ireland, changes which have fashioned a more diverse, multicultural Ireland, where the old ethnic composition of Irish and British, or settled and Traveller, has been transformed into a new mosaic of majority and minority, citizen and immigrant, Europeans and the others. New forms of governance are taking shape throughout Europe. New ways of deciding public policy, along with transformations in historical relations between political and civil society within and between European countries, are daily engaging global and local forces of resistance and subversion, on the one hand, and of support and enhancement, on the other. Racism is becoming an important topic in anthropological analyses of European societies, despite many forces which until recently had all but eliminated it as a research. Racism has long been a feature of Irish society, most notable in the past in the forms of anti-Irish, anti-Catholic and anti-Presbyterian policies and programmes.
