Reimagining identity and belonging in Ireland

Blog post by Malgosia Machowska-Kosciak and Maria Barry, Dublin City University, Ireland

In recent years, Ireland has witnessed worrying headlines: anti-immigrant protests, arson attacks on refugee accommodation, and growing online disinformation campaigns. Such incidents jar with the country’s self-image as the land of céad míle fáilte – a hundred thousand welcomes – and force us to ask: who gets to be considered Irish today?

For young people born in Ireland to migrant parents, or who arrived as children, this question is lived daily. Our Identities article, ‘Forty shades of ‘otherness’ – engaging with second-generation migrant young people’s identities through intersectionality, power and agency’, explores how second-generation youth navigate these tensions – and, crucially, how they refuse to let rigid labels define them.

In our study, participants described microaggressions and exclusions: a foreign-sounding name, a distinctive accent, a hijab in school, each sparking questions about their belonging. But these stories are not simply about being positioned as ‘other’. They are also about how young people resist, reinterpret and reshape what Irishness means.

Take Shane, who moved from Ghana at age five. When told he could not be Irish, he pushed back: “If you don’t call me Irish then what is the reason for the passport, citizenship?” In that moment, Shane wasn’t just defending himself – he was exposing contradictions in narrow definitions of citizenship and demanding a more inclusive vision. Similarly, Anaya, of Somali heritage, rejected binary choices altogether: “I can’t really identify as one or the other since I have both”. By asserting hybridity as authenticity, she demonstrated that identity can be expansive rather than restrictive.
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These examples show young people exercising what we call agency within constraint. Instead of passively accepting labels, they create space for themselves: resisting stereotypes, reclaiming heritage, or blending cultures on their own terms. Sometimes this meant challenging authority figures directly, sometimes it meant cultivating dual or hybrid identities that drew strength from multiple traditions. In all cases, it reflected a determination not to let others dictate the boundaries of belonging.

Intersectionality helps explain why this agency is so significant. Young people do not experience exclusion on a single axis – race, class, gender, religion and language intersect to shape their encounters. Yet, through everyday acts of resistance, they transform these intersections from sites of oppression into opportunities for redefinition. A mispronounced name, for instance, becomes not just a mark of exclusion but a prompt to assert the right to recognition. A restrictive school policy becomes the ground for negotiating visibility.

Importantly, these strategies are not only personal but collective. Participants found common ground in their stories and affirmed each other’s counternarratives. In doing so, they built solidarity and imagined new, more inclusive versions of Irishness – ones that better reflect the country’s reality today.

This is why their voices matter so much. Identity denial carries costs for wellbeing and belonging, but young people’s responses reveal resilience, creativity and vision. They are not simply caught between ‘forty shades of otherness’ and rigid national categories; they are actively sketching alternative shades of Irishness – fluid, hybrid, authentic identities that challenge exclusionary norms.

The challenge for Irish society is to listen. These young people are already shaping the future of belonging. If their agency is recognized, their voices are supported, and their hybridity is celebrated as a strength, then perhaps Ireland can truly live up to its reputation as a place of a hundred thousand welcomes – not by flattening difference, but by embracing it.

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Image credit: Brave film (Machowska-Kosciak & Barry, 2024)

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Read the Identities article:
Machowska-Kosciak, M. & Barry, M. (2025). Forty shades of ‘otherness’ – engaging with second-generation migrant young people’s identities through intersectionality, power and agency. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: ​10.1080/1070289X.2025.2543656

Read further in Identities:

​Boundaries of Frenchness: cultural citizenship and France’s middle-class North African second-generation

Substantive signifiers? Ethnic and religious identifications among second-generation immigrants in the Netherlands
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Transnational ties and ethnic identities in the parental homeland: second-generation Indian Americans in India