ABSTRACT
On 23 June 2016, the electorate of the UK voted, by a slim majority, to leave the EU.1 The implications of Brexit (UK EU exit) for the island of Ireland, as would be expected, generated considerable concern in Ireland, less so in the UK, or at least in Great Britain. When pressed about the possibility of a hard border between the UK province of Northern Ireland and sovereign state of Ireland, ‘Brexiteers’ referred to the British/Irish Common Travel Area (CTA). This arrangement pre-dated EU (at the time, EEC) accession, and could, and should, continue post Brexit. There is perhaps some irony in Brexiteers referring to the CTA to support their case. The CTA, a successful example of the benefits of soft borders and free movement, is the precursor to the larger freedom of movement within the EU (Meehan 2000) against which Brexiteers mobilised so successfully. The referendum campaign (and its fallout) centred on immigration,2 with the EU principle of freedom of movement being blamed for the UK population reaching, to quote some of the more reckless Leave-campaign hyperbole, ‘breaking point’.3 So dominant was this claim that some government ministers posited the right of EU nationals to remain in the UK as a bargaining chip for future Brexit negotiations. Such discourses only served to further highlight regional differentials within the UK, Northern Ireland being the most anomalous of all. For a start (as we examine in more detail below) net immigration in Northern Ireland is extremely low.4 Second, discourse positing the removal of ‘EU nationals’ from the territory of the UK is apparently oblivious to the fact that those born and resident in Northern Ireland have a ‘birthright’ to be Irish citizens (and hence EU citizens) and be recognised as equal, with no distinction or discrimination, to British citizens.5 Northern Ireland, then, is the region of the UK in which the impossibility of a clean separation of ‘British’ from ‘other European’ is most apparent. The 1998 Agreement enabled compromise in Northern Ireland by fusing an intertwining of hybrid identities and a blurring of sovereignties (as seen in the institutions for interstate cooperation and multilevel governance). Such ‘fuzzy’ lines of inclusion/exclusion were made more acceptable and normalised in the context of ‘these islands’ and EU membership. However, the outworking and interpretation of the Agreement has revealed a resistance to allowing such hybridity or ‘fuzziness’ to be reflected in institutions and cultures of political
representation in Northern Ireland. There have been many criticisms of Northern Ireland’s current socio-political environment as one in which ‘ethnic nepotism’ is rife, sustaining the narrative of fundamentally separate communities upholding oppositional versions of nationalism (Morrow 2011, 2016; see also Chapters 2, 4 and 6 in this volume by Arthur, Todd and Ruane respectively). These trends are not confined to Northern Ireland. Despite there being profound confusion and contradiction in the categories of national identity and ethnicity used even within these islands, public sentiment and official discourse uphold the conceit that distinctions between ethnic and national groups on the island can be quite easily drawn. This is seen in the reaction to an increase in migration flows and the expansion of the EU. Whilst the context of globalisation and European integration points to, and enhances, the fluidity, hybridity and complexity of collective identities and human experience, British and Irish responses to these challenges have sought to shore up ‘national integrity’, as if it were something preserved through ancestral inheritance rather than by preference, interests and context.6 The example we consider in this chapter is the move to restrict the birthright to Irish citizenship to be more ‘ethnically’ exclusive and selective. As with Brexit, this move was legitimised by a popular referendum (11 June 2004). A large majority (79 per cent) voted in favour of the 27th constitutional amendment, which saw the birthright of Irish citizenship to those born on the island (as per Article 2) restricted to those who had Irish parents or grandparents (as per the new Article 9.2). A key argument for restricting the automatic, constitutionally enshrined birthright to Irish citizenship to any child born on the island of Ireland, was that this offered a back route to EU citizenship for ‘Others’, i.e. non-EU migrants. Migrants, primarily asylum-seeking migrants, were presented as cynically abusing Irish citizenship law to gain access to the state and, by extension, the EU. Yet, Irish nationalists in the North were vocal opponents of restricting a birthright to citizenship, arguing that any dilution of the primacy of Ireland’s territory as the basis for Irish citizenship would undermine the spirit (if not the law) of the 1998 Agreement, as well as their own ideological position. As this chapter recounts, such objections were dismissed by politicians and voters in the Republic, who saw immigration (particularly, asylum-seeking migration) as having rapidly surpassed partition as the most pressing threat to the integrity of the Irish nation. This chapter brings an all-island perspective to topics that have come to the fore in the fallout from both the 2004 Irish referendum and 2016 UK referendum: immigration, citizenship and national identity. It begins by considering how processes of inclusion/exclusion in the definition of nationhood connect to rules of citizenship. It goes on to outline the factors shaping the delineation of citizenship and nationhood on the island of Ireland before summarising the breakthrough compromise achieved in this area by the 1998 Agreement. The importance of national, ethnic and cultural identification in post-Agreement Northern Ireland means that, as we explore, the contradictions and confusion in the categories used for these same identities in the forms currently used for
population censuses on the island. Such confusion is particularly notable given the context of migration flows on the island and the diversity of ‘others’ resident here. It was a desire to maintain a distinction between ‘others’ and ‘Irish’ that formed the rationale for the 2004 27th constitutional amendment, which is considered at the conclusion of the chapter as a case of ‘ethnic nepotism’ at work. Overall, the chapter shows that European integration has been a spur for both progressive interculturalism and ethnic nepotism on the island since the Agreement. At the time or writing, the UK’s relationships with Ireland and the rest of the EU are uncertain as a consequence of the Brexit referendum. Nonetheless, what can be said with certainty is that the intertwining of national identities and cultures on the island of Ireland means that drawing lines of exclusion in either jurisdiction will be fraught with particular sensitivities and complexity.
