How 9/11 Copperfastened Ireland’s Diversity Agenda

Millennial readers would agree that the impact of the War on Terror in the 2000s was limited to debates around the use of Shannon Airport and a lively anti-war movement against Bush’s incursion into Iraq. The air travel paranoia and counterjihad zeitgeist may have trickled down through the cultural hegemon, but it is fair to say the Republic, grappling with the tail end of the northern peace process, Eurointegration, and the Boom, had other issues at hand.

What has yet to be properly remembered is that no sooner than the memorial flowers outside the American Embassy on Ballsbridge had been cleaned up than a proactive campaign against anti-Muslim hatred was begun by the then Ahern administration.

While accepting the potential of Islamic extremism to reside within the state, the then Taoiseach signalled out anti-Islamic hatred in his Dáil remarks the week after the attacks, later going on to make a much-publicised PR visit to Clonskeagh Mosque to quell an understandable current of Islamophobia in the nation at large. The Irish government’s response should naturally be coached in the spirit of the Belfast Agreement and Dublin’s mixed feelings on terrorism following the Troubles.

Ironic, considering his doorside comments, twenty-plus years later Ahern went on to state “we know that the true followers of Islam do not present a threat to peace anywhere” with the Department of Justice designing a custom anti-racism policy in the weeks after the Twin Towers fell.

With almost an equal emphasis on racism as much as jihadism, Gardaí in October 2001 began systematically recording racially motivated incidents through PULSE, while the Department of Justice-funded National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI).

The government soon after introduced Ireland’s first National Action Plan Against Racism (NPAR), inspired by the national consultation getting the ball rolling on the diversity agenda at a state level. Clonskeagh mosque subsequently shuttered briefly due to extremism allegations, became an interface point between the state and moderate Islam as the country went through the motions of various flashpoints, including the London Bombings, Dutch cartoon protests and vicissitudes of Bush’s Middle East Wars. Each more than the last, underlining the civilisation chasm at play.

In March the next year, during election season, Ahern and leaders of the main political parties signed an anti-racism election protocol, committing campaigns not to give rise to racism. Ahern simultaneously reaffirmed the Government’s “wholehearted commitment” to combating discrimination and promoting tolerance and human rights.

Islam in Ireland was then in its demographic infancy, numbering about 15,000 adherents circa 2001; that figure is now shy of 100,000 if census data can be believed. In short Ireland missed the bus in the 2000s on normalising a restrictive migration system that would have preserved a largely homogeneous society outside of Eastern Europeans.

Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Somalia were already among countries subject to Irish transit-visa requirements before 9/11. Instead of appearing at Clonskeagh Mosque for photoshoots, Ahern and the Department of Justice could have narrowed work permits to shortage occupations, imposed stricter employer tests, reduced permits in particular sectors, or changed recruitment policy, in tandem with an asylum clampdown that would have killed replacement migration in the womb.

Applicants from states considered security risks could have faced additional intelligence checks, interviews and scrutiny of travel histories or associations. Largely unknown but from 1999 onwards, the Justice Minister could issue an exclusion order against an individual non-national on national-security or public-policy grounds; 

Instead, Ahern expended some political bandwidth (profitably) on the citizens’ referendum, and the country was swept up in the vainglorious mania of the bomb and crash, ignoring the real demographic time bomb beginning to tick.

Twenty-five years on from 9/11, while the Republic is without the hellish anti-Islamophobia speech laws that plague the UK and other jurisdictions, remember how easily the state could have changed course and how Ireland’s security threats were not limited to box cutters at airports.