The blacks of Ireland are not the blacks of America

and not every issue affecting the blacks of America affects the blacks of Ireland in the same way

I

[Here’s the obligatory throat-clearing “I’m not racist but” paragraph before I get into the spicy takes.] It would be foolish and ignorant for anyone to argue that Irish society is devoid of racism. Strictly limiting myself to examples from my own experience, last year I dated a Moroccan woman who no longer wore the hijab after an incident in which a trio of young Irishmen tried to rip it off her and yelled at her to go back to her own country. In 2020, around the start of the pandemic, a woman I was dating was pelted with sweets by two Irish teenagers, who loudly blamed her for bringing Covid into the country (she was Japanese, not Chinese, but whatever). Racism can just as easily be found in Ireland as in any other country, and it’s just as ugly and cruel here as anywhere else.

But for all that, some of the specific claims that antiracist activists routinely make about Irish history or culture are unfounded, and some of the demands they make about how to address racism in Ireland are not merely unrealistic or politically unfeasible, but actually mathematically impossible. 

Two years ago, The Journal provided a perfectly illustrative example of the phenomenon I’m describing when, amidst the fervour surrounding the murder of George Floyd, they published an opinion piece by the activist Diane Ihirwe. Whatever her talents as a social worker, Ihirwe isn’t much of a writer: she uses Floyd’s murder as a clumsy framing device linking a string of unrelated grievances about her personal experiences of anti-black racism in Ireland.¹ In spite of the rudimentary prose, several of her anecdotes are striking and disheartening, particularly her account of the racist abuse directed towards her young son. I bristled a little when she collectively referred to white people as “the oppressor”, but look: the summer of 2020 was a heady and confusing time and it’s hard to blame anyone for getting caught up in the excitement.

It was only towards the end of the piece, where Ihirwe delved into specific policy recommendations for her majority-white readership, that the piece really started to get my back up. “Are you walking into an office with all white people?” she asks accusingly. “That’s not right. You know it’s not right. And, now, there’s no excuse. So speak up.”

If I’m reading Ihirwe correctly, she seems to believe that, if an Irish firm does not employ at least one black person, that’s “not right” i.e. that firm is racist. More broadly, her statement could be interpreted to mean that Ireland will be a racist country so long as it permits firms to only hire white people if they so choose. This demand is completely unfeasible - not in the sense of “the proposal could be enacted, but there’s no political capital to implement it” - but in the sense that it literally cannot be accomplished given the current makeup of the Irish populace. Let me explain.

II

In order to achieve Ihirwe’s demand, every workplace in Ireland needs to hire at least one black person. According to the Central Statistics Office, there were 4.76 million people living in the Republic as of April 2016². Of these, 64,639 identified as “black or black Irish - African” or “black or black Irish - any other black background”, representing about 1.35% of the total population. Surely that’s enough for each workplace to hire at least one?

No, as it happens, it isn’t. Again according to the CSO, there were 250,033³ active enterprises operating in the Republic as of April 2016. Supposing that tonight, the Antiracist Unicorn pays a visit to every Irish employer while visions of sugar-plums dance in their heads, and tomorrow morning these employers collectively decide to hire at least one black employee before the calendar year is out. Even under these “ideal” circumstances, there would still be a huge shortfall: 185,394 enterprises would find themselves without a single black employee, because “demand” would exceed supply by 74%. There simply aren’t enough black people to go around.

A real book, apparently.

“But wait - Ihirwe said offices, not enterprises in general. Surely there are enough offices in the country to hire at least one black person?” Granted, the terminology is a little ambiguous, and some people use “office” informally to refer to any workplace, but let’s give Ihirwe the benefit of the doubt and assume she meant something like “a building, or annex within a building, in which people are sitting at desks in front of computers doing non-manual labour”. 

The CSO doesn’t group types of enterprise according to this distinction, but according to figure 16.8, there are 91,323⁴ enterprises which unambiguously meet this description based on their economic sector. It’s important to bear in mind that the remaining 158,680 enterprises also includes plenty of “offices” according to the above definition (e.g. one of the economic sectors listed is “manufacturing”, which would include both factories and manufacturing plants, and also the offices in which administrative staff handle logistics, financials, human resources etc.). So even if we give Ihirwe the benefit of the doubt, there will still be a shortfall of at least 26,000 offices without a single black employee.

But even this is too generous to Ihirwe. Of the aforementioned 64,639 black people in Ireland, 36.1% are 14 or younger, so must be excluded from the labour force, which shrinks the pool of available black talent to 39,388.⁵ And that’s before we get into considerations like the number of black people in Ireland who are in full-time third-level education, who are over the age of 65, who are unable to work because of a disability, who are stay-at-home parents and so on. It also doesn’t consider the geographic distribution of the black labour force across the Republic (or, for that matter, the geographic distribution of employers).

Population pyramids for “black or black Irish - African” and “black or black Irish - Any other black background”.

Ihirwe says that there’s “no excuse” for not speaking up about Irish offices in which all of the staff are white. Is “given the current makeup of the Irish population, it is mathematically impossible for every Irish office to hire at least one black person” a valid excuse?

“But wait - Ihirwe said ‘offices with all white people’. Perhaps she was bemoaning a general lack of ethnic diversity in Irish employment, rather than a paucity of black employees in particular?” Given that Ihirwe’s piece was directly inspired by the murder of George Floyd and only described instances of racism against black people in Ireland (as opposed to racism against any ethnic minority group in Ireland), I think it’s reasonable to assume that she was demanding that Irish employers hire more black people in particular, as opposed to non-white people in general. Nonetheless, if we interpret her demand as such, this is the most reasonable objection that can be raised to my rebuttal. If we expand the pool of ethnic minorities to include Asian people and “other, including mixed background” in addition to black people, the relevant figure increases from 64,639 to 233,962.⁶ If we exclude those aged 14 or younger, it shrinks to 160,003 (again, before excluding those aged 65 or older, those in full-time third-level education etc.). It might be possible for every office in the Republic to hire at least one person who is black, Asian or “other, including mixed background”, but only just. It is certainly not possible for every employer, regardless of economic sector, to hire at least one person meeting that description.

It really illustrates the poverty of modern Western discourse concerning race, that when many companies in a given nation don’t employ any black people, “racism” is the default explanation, which must be exhaustively and laboriously refuted before any other possible explanations can even be considered. Ihirwe has evidently heard stories from her friends about offices in which every employee was white, and she immediately arrived at the conclusion that the only possible explanation for this was that Irish employers, as a group, are systematically racist. The fact that there simply aren’t very many black people in Ireland appears not to even have occurred to her.

I expect I am likely to be misinterpreted here, so I want to explicitly state that I am not claiming that racial bias plays no role in the rate at which black people in Ireland are hired. It’s perfectly possible that, all other things being equal, a black person in Ireland might have a harder time finding a job than a white person, and that racial animus among the people who make hiring decisions is a contributing factor. My point is that the ethnic demographics of the Republic are the primary reason that most Irish offices have no black employees. What’s more, this state of affairs would persist even if all of the hiring decisions were made by people who share Ihirwe’s politics, and who were given full legal remit to openly use ethnicity as a qualifying factor in making these decisions.

III

So how did Ihirwe arrive at this erroneous conclusion, that black people in Ireland represent such a large proportion of the population of Ireland that it should be feasible (even trivial) for every Irish company to hire at least one? Probably there is a disproportionately large number of black people in her immediate social circle: I suspect that just about everyone is guilty of the fallacy of assuming, on some level, that the demographics of their social circle are representative of society at large.⁷ Perhaps it’s partly to do with the popular media she consumes: for all the ambient discussion about the importance of promoting diversity in pop culture, a study from two years ago found that ethnic minority actors are dramatically overrepresented in British telly (23% of TV roles compared to 13% of the UK population). I virtually never watch Irish telly and I don’t know if someone has carried out a similar analysis of the ethnicity of actors who appear on it, but it’s certainly possible that the same conclusion is true here.

But I suspect that far and away the biggest reason Ihirwe’s impression of Irish demographics is so skewed is because, like so many Irish people (especially young Irish people), she thinks she lives in the United States. That is, she consumes so much American popular culture, American journalism and American social media, that she has come to believe (whether consciously or unconsciously) that anything which is true of the United States is also true of Ireland. It’s bad enough when Americans do this about Ireland (e.g. tourists from Wisconsin who are flabbergasted upon arriving in Dublin and learning that the dollar is not a universally accepted currency); it’s even worse when Irish people who have lived in Ireland for their entire lives do it to themselves.

It’s so tiresome how steeped young Irish people are in American culture and politics, and so ignorant of the politics, culture and history of the country in which they actually reside. I feel it’s almost gotten to the point where many young Irish people can only understand something about Irish politics if it’s explained to them using the nearest American analogue. Hence the cringeworthy attempts to declare that such-and-such Irish politician is the “Trump of Ireland” (the Healy-Raes are popular targets of this comparison); the dismissive retort “OK boomer” being directed towards older Irish people, conveniently ignoring that Ireland was functionally a Third World nation at the time the American “baby boomer” generation was being born; the preposterous “Not My Taoiseach” protests outside Leinster House, borrowing the “Not My President” slogan directed towards Donald Trump; or George Nkencho’s brother Emmanuel demanding that the “fed” who shot his brother be “terminated” (Ireland is not a federal state and never has been, and consequently does not employ any federal law enforcement officers). “West Brit” (that is, an Irish person who seems ashamed to be Irish and wishes they were British instead) has been a term of derision in Irish politics for decades, but in a recent discussion about Sally Rooney’s novels I encountered the successor term “east Yank”; I find the new term delightful, and I hope it catches on.

Thank you for flaunting your staggering ignorance of how not one but two modern representative democracies function (source).

This framing is really the only way I can make sense of why Ihirwe thought her demand was logical or reasonable. Through consuming a great deal of American journalism and popular culture, she correctly observed some surface similarities between the US and Ireland (affluent Anglophone nations; white-majority populace; one or other form of Christianity was dominant for centuries but is now in decline; multinational tech companies employ many staff etc.), but incorrectly arrived at the erroneous conclusion that anything which is true of the US can be assumed to be more-or-less true of Ireland as well, up to and including their respective ethnic demographics. Demanding that every office hire at least one black person is not a completely ridiculous demand in a country in which black people make up roughly 13% of the population. It is completely ridiculous in a country in which they make up 1.35%. 

While writing this post, I wondered if it would seem a bit weird, writing an article in response to an opinion piece written and published nearly two years ago. Serendipitously, the Irish Times were kind enough to provide a more recent example of the same general argument, but so phrased as to make Ihirwe’s demands seem almost reasonable by comparison. In Sorcha Pollak’s recent interview with Patricia Munatsi, Munatsi offers this quote (which is also the headline):

Ireland is a very diverse community [no it isn’t, as outlined above, but that’s neither here nor there] but that’s not reflected in our institutions. I look at different companies which employ thousands of people and say on their websites they’re grounded by diversity and inclusion. But then there’s only one black person on staff.

I’ll grant Munatsi one thing: Ihirwe was complaining about all Irish offices regardless of their pretensions to progressivism (or lack thereof), whereas Munatsi’s complaint is only directed towards those companies which make a point of boasting of how diverse and inclusive they are, and which are, in her view, failing to live up to their stated ethos. Nevertheless, given how widespread “diversity and inclusion” initiatives are becoming in Ireland, it’s only a matter of time before the two amount to more or less the same thing.

Ihirwe was generous enough to allow that an Irish company which hires at least one black person is hence not a racist company. Less than two years later, an unrelated antiracist activist (featured in Ireland’s ostensible newspaper of record, no less) has already moved the goalposts. In Munatsi’s view, even the Irish companies who have, against all demographic odds, succeeded in hiring one black person - even those companies are failing to live up to their stated ideals of diversity and inclusion, and hence (one assumes) cannot in good conscience call themselves “antiracist”.

In case you were wondering why this pattern of shifting demands seems familiar, it’s because it’s a textbook definition of a racket. In twenty years’ time, after Ireland has become far more ethnically diverse than it currently is, one of Ihirwe or Munatsi’s successors will be complaining about Irish companies which employ a mere five black people, and how failing to hire any less than that is tantamount to Jim Crow. Compare these demands to this scene from the film Drive and explain to me how it’s any different.

Standard: They want me to rob a pawnshop in the Valley.

Driver: Why?

Standard: Cos I owe them some protection money from when I was inside. It’s two thousand bucks. But as soon as I got out, oh, it’s five thousand bucks. Oh no, actually it’s ten thousand dollars. Twenty thousand dollars. Tomorrow I don’t know what the fuck it’s gonna be.

IV

Why is there no pushback against demands like Ihirwe’s and Munatsi’s? In my limited experience, political activists who make unrealistic demands usually have the infeasibility of their demands pointed out to them. This applies even to demands which in principle could be implemented, but which currently sit outside of the Overton window (e.g. universal basic income, reunification of the North and South, decriminalisation of controlled substances). But the reaction (or lack thereof) to the demands made by antiracist activists is something else entirely. Ihirwe and Munatsi’s policy proposals are not merely unrealistic but mathematically impossible - and to the best of my knowledge, no one is pushing back against them, or simply politely pointing out that their demand cannot be met even under ideal circumstances. Why is this?

Perhaps the kinds of people who listen to Ihirwe and Munatsi are equally ignorant about the true state of the ethnic demographics of Ireland - you could be forgiven for thinking that most Irish journalists and political activists are American based on how they behave on Twitter and the way they frame political issues. But I suspect many Irish people in fact know full well that the number of black people in Ireland is vanishingly small, but are too afraid to mention this inconvenient fact for fear of being called racist. White progressives spend large portions of their daily lives in a paralysing fear of being accused of harbouring racist attitudes, which leads them to refrain from pointing out obviously nonsensical demands when such demands are made by a person of African descent. To such people I can only say: if simply knowing the fact that black people represent 1.35% of the Irish population makes you “racist”, then the word no longer means anything at all, and words which mean nothing at all are best put out to pasture, rather than sitting around taking up semantic space.

Here are some other things that don’t make you racist just because you know them or believe in them:

• Racism is not the primary cause of the ethnic homogeneity of most Irish workplaces - the ethnic homogeneity of Ireland is.

• The ethnic homogeneity of most Irish workplaces would persist even if racial affirmative action was legal and all of the hiring decisions were made by woke people like Ihirwe or Munatsi.

• Although individual racist people can be found in Ireland (as in every other country in the world), Ireland is not an institutionally racist country.

• Institutional racism against black people does not exist and has never existed in Ireland - there are no analogues to Jim Crow, the “three-fifths compromise”, racially segregated bathrooms etc. in Irish history. Legislation intended to oppress black people in Ireland would be pointless as, until very recently, there were effectively no black people in Ireland to serve as the object of this oppression - one might as well have passed anti-Martian legislation.

• The ethnic demographics of Ireland are dramatically different from those of the United States.

• Not every political issue which is important in the United States is important in Ireland (and vice versa).

1.  The title gets off to a particularly rocky start: “Racism is the knee on our neck, making it hard to breathe”. It doesn’t exactly bode well for the journalist’s confidence in their writing ability (or their sub-editor’s confidence in same) when the second clause of the headline has to outright explain the metaphor contained in the first. 

2. The CSO conducted another census in April of this year. I intend to update this post with the most recent figures once they’ve been published, but I would be exceptionally surprised if the new figures significantly change my basic argument.

3. This is an imperfect estimate: many enterprises operate multiple independent offices (e.g. the EY accountancy firm has offices in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford). Conversely, the figure of 250,033 may include enterprises which don’t really have a conventional associated workplace or staff (e.g. a freelancer who works from home and hires no employees, but who is registered as an enterprise for tax purposes). But it’s a good enough estimate for our purposes.

4. 14,570 “information and communication”, 6,557 “financial and insurance”, 13,249 “real estate”, 40,452 “profession, scientific etc.” and 16,495 “administrative and support” enterprises.

5. As you can see from the population pyramids, the age demographics are grouped into buckets labelled “0-4”, “5-9”, “10-14” and “15-19”. The latter bucket obviously includes teenagers below the legal working age of 16, but as I don’t know the specific breakdown of ages within that bucket I will count the entire “15-19” bucket as part of the labour force.

6. This might sound vanishingly small to you (just under 5% of the population), but even this small percentage of non-white people in Ireland represents a stratospheric increase over the relevant figure from thirty years ago. Part of the reason the “Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland” joke in The Commitments works is that, at the time of the film’s release, for all intents and purposes there were no blacks in Ireland. Take a look at the data from the 1991 census: you’ll find a detailed breakdown of the Irish population by age, sex, county, electoral district, marital status, household composition, employment status, religion, economic sector and even fluency in the Irish language, but conspicuously absent is any explicit discussion of ethnicity. The closest you’ll get is section 8, table 34 which lists census respondents by country of birth. A mere 6.49% of the Irish population at the time was born outside of Ireland: 4.93% in the UK, 0.48% in white-majority European countries like Germany, France and the Netherlands, and 1.07% in the USA or “other”.

7. Is it any wonder that so many people who voted Remain in the Brexit referendum were absolutely shocked when the results of the referendum came in? I suspect many of them couldn’t name a single person in their social circle who voted Leave.