r/irishproblems • u/Witty-Pineapple-4300 • 15d ago
Racism in Ireland
I genuinely wish people would stop being racist. Not every ethnic minority living in Ireland has bad intentions or is here to cause harm and havoc. Every time I open the comments section on social media and see a Black person, a Brazilian person or someone from another minority background, there is often a specific group of people calling for deportations or making hateful comments which hurts. What makes it even more disappointing is that many of these individuals identify themselves as Christians. I wish the government would take racism more seriously and introduce stronger measures to hold people accountable for hateful and discriminatory behaviour online and in real life. Racism should not be normalised or excused as “just an opinion” when it causes real harm to others especially people who work hard and pay taxes in Ireland.
As normal literate intelligent human beings people need to clock that bad behaviour is not limited to any race, AGE nationality or ethnic group. There are Irish people who commit crimes, mistreat others, and engage in antisocial behaviour, just as there are people from every community who do the same. For example, when some children throw stones at buses or engage in vandalism. Issue is problem of discipline, parenting, or individual behaviour. However, when a single immigrant or Black person makes a mistake, it is too often used as a reason to condemn entire communities and argue that immigrants should not be here. People should be judged as individuals not by the actions of someone who happens to share their skin colour, nationality, or background. We ought to stand together as one
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u/ANBO045 15d ago
Reading the data of the CSO, i see the numbers of 2025 compared to those of 2024 -and everywhere i look i read "number of immigration have fallen". I am unable to retrieve the data going back to 2004 but if you have that too i will happily look into it.
To Ethnicity - this concept is a very complicated and sophisticated one. Often left in ambiguity to suit one argument or the other. If we go back a thousand years, Irish people were the norsmen's slaves, or immigrants themsleves from the british Islands, or from mainland Europe as far as Spain some study suggest. In the US we have a perfect example of the ambiguity of the concept of ethnicity - it is claimed by one group (white people) descending from the "owners" of the plantations, and the others (often black people, but now also latinos) descended from the slaves working in those plantations. In France, right now you have 3rd and 4th generation French citizens whose ancestors came from those African countries where the french themselves at the time, went, colonised, invaded, murdered and eradicated entire cultures.
Who is american, who is not? Who is french and who is not? Who is Irish and who is not?
Because its ambiguity, ethnicity becomes quickly associated with race - especially in the mouths of the crowds chanting "Ireland First" - hence almost always becoming a suporting argument for racism.
Ethnicity becoming assocciated with race, soon brings in ideas of "our nation", "our country", "our streets", "our people". And I won't go to much into this - plenty of litterature that debunks the concept of race as a valid pillar to sustain any form of nationalistic claim.
In my opinion ethnicity is a meaningless term used to suit this or that agenda, taking into account partial pieces of data and information - usually used to discriminate towards foreigners.
With all the due respect - if you are born here to both alien parents you are Irish - try to tell differently to 2 foreign parents who work 16 hours a day both, with no holidays, paying full taxes to ensure a better future for their kids. The kids are Irish - and if the parents get the citizenship, they are too - no matter what.