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Very much agree with @desondy and I’d go a step further to say that white supremacy/racism and Irish nationalism have gone hand in hand for well over a hundred years. Eamon de Valera in 1920: “Ireland is now the last white nation deprived of its liberty” /1 https://twitter.com/desondy/status/1343934746116677634
Erskine Childers, Sinn Féin’s Director of Publicity in the first Dáil Éireann, claimed that whiteness was essential for self-determination and admired the Boers because they were “white men accustomed to free institutions” and not “coloured barbarians”. /2
Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh, President of Ireland 1945-59 – said to Benedict XV in 1920: “our aim is to achieve that independence which every other white race in the world has already won…Ireland alone of all white nations is denied the universally accepted right of self-determination.”
Many of the demands by Irish nationalists for independence were based on ‘whiteness’ rather than a genuine opposition to imperialism as a structure, or a genuine anticolonial solidarity with people in other movements.
The notion that “Irishness” is an ancient, linear identity that is exclusively the victim of colonial oppression, as well as the idea that any criticism of Irish nationalism is automatically an apology for empire need to be challenged at every turn
One can be highly critical of Irish nationalism and vociferously opposed to imperialism not least because nationalism was never the only way in which people have historically opposed imperialism.
