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'Racialised from the Start' Symposium on the 2004 Citizenship Referendum

18th October, 2024

A one-day symposium marking 20 years since the 2004 citizenship referendum, hosted by The Centre for Forced Migration Studies and Black Studies in Trinity Long Room Hub.

The symposium was organised by Professor Phil Mullen, Eve Doran, and Sorcha Mellon of the Department of Sociology, and funded by the Equality Office at Trinity College Dublin.

The 2004 Citizenship Referendum had a lasting impact on how immigration debates in Ireland became racialised, marking a shift toward a more exclusive definition of Irishness by introducing a legal framework that denied the automatic right to citizenship for children of non-national parents born in Ireland. Political discourse at the time reinforced an ‘us versus them’ mentality, with the latter predominantly serving as a coded reference to Africans and other racialised, non-European migrants. This rhetoric drew rigid lines around who was considered to belong to the Irish nation and who was not, thereby racialising citizenship itself.

Despite the government's pretence that the proposed referendum was neutral, its racial impact was unmistakable, raising questions about structural racism and how laws and policies can produce racially unequal outcomes, even when race is not explicitly mentioned in the text.

- Professor Phil Mullen

View programme and abstracts here: Racialised from the Start 2024 / Abstracts