Abstract

In this paper we examine the discursive production and employment of, what Irish politicians term, ‘commonsense citizenship’ as a means of addressing and regulating new immigration to Ireland, and in re-defining Irishness and Irish citizenship (culminating in a national Citizenship referendum in June 2004). We argue that commonsense citizenship is employed in such a way as to fix and essentialise Irishness, thus highlighting the threatening other, and to construct immigrants as suspect, untrustworthy, and deserving of Ireland’s ‘hospitality’ only in limited, prescribed ways or not at all. Through examining six troubling paradoxes we reveal slippages, contradictions and nuances that commonsense citizenship works to deny and erase, but nevertheless work to undermine its essentialism and injustices. In so doing, we argue these paradoxes open ways to rethink Irish citizenship, and how such a notion is produced discursively.