It is certainly possible to be half-witted. But is it possible to be half-racist? The Dublin Central byelection has given us two prime examples of the first condition that are also two test cases of the second. Bertie Ahern and Gerry Hutch have tried out different versions of a-la-carte chauvinism.The anonymous woman who surreptitiously filmed Ahern’s attempt to canvass her is a table d’hote xenophobe. Every kind of stranger is on the menu: “the hordes of foreigners coming into the country”; “all these Indians that have a space programme”; “these Muslims [that] have 47 countries”; “all these Africans that have a massive continent, massive natural resources”; “these rich Indians coming in and buying up all the property and they want our kids to live in sheds or something”. She’s not convinced by Ukrainian refugees either: “The Ukrainian war is only in one tiny little place and Ukraine is a massive country.” All of these incomers “don’t give a shit about Ireland, they don’t have the feeling that we have. Our culture is gone.”This is what the whole hog looks like. But Bertie reached for the bacon slicer. Instead of challenging these sweeping claims, he thought he could offer this potential voter some satisfying selections from her smorgasbord of prejudices. “The ones I worry about are the Africans,” he suggested, going on to specify the Congolese. As for the Muslims, the first generation is okay but we should be very concerned about its children.And of course this is, at one level, just classic Bertie-ism. He practised it on a grand scale in his years in power: always give everybody something. If you asked Bertie for the Moon he’d tell you that the whole thing might not be available just now but he knows a fella who has an eye on the Sea of Tranquillity and he could put in a word. Yet there’s more to it than that. Ahern’s tactic was similar to that of the gangland figure Gerry Hutch, who is contesting the byelection. He had suggested that “illegal immigrants” should be interned in the Curragh. But he excluded those who work in low-paying job: “We don’t want our kids working in McDonald’s, we need foreign workers for them type of jobs, whether we like it or not, we’re gone too posh.” Internment is for “the ones that are Somalians and them type of people”.There is no steady state in modern Irish history where everyone born on the island – and no one else – lives here. Either they’re coming or we’re goingThe most obvious thing about the unwanted nationalities specified by Ahern and Hutch is that they are black. The second most obvious thing is that there are no “hordes” descending on Ireland from either Congo or Somalia. As of March, the number of asylum seekers from Somalia (where there is chronic conflict) was 645 – roughly the same as the population of grand metropolises such as Ballindine or Kildysart. As for the Congolese that have our former taoiseach so agitated, their number is so small that it is not reported separately but is aggregated into the “Other” category. An educated guess would be somewhere about 100.[ Bertie’s outburst wasn’t part of a Fianna Fáil master plan. It was worse than thatOpens in new window ]But of course the point for both Hutch and Ahern is that the names of these countries act as proxies for race. They stand for Darkest Africa – dark as in both skin colour and the infinite ignorance that permits anything at all to be said about the people who inhabit it. Their underlying suggestion is that inward migration should be a sieve that lets through the foreign workers who will do the lowly jobs we’re too posh for, but blocks those who are fleeing conflicts in Africa from seeking asylum. The irony in this, however, is that the anonymous woman who recorded Ahern while she ranted about immigrants is more coherent and (oddly) less racist than this. She is an equal-opportunities nativist: “foreigners” are the problem. They are not and will never be Irish because being Irish is a “feeling” and they just don’t have it.Yet as even Hutch half-recognises, the Ireland that doesn’t have immigrants is a race of emigrants. If they’re not coming here, it’s because we’re too poor to offer them a better life – and thus also too poor to hang to our own young people. There is no steady state in modern Irish history where everyone born on the island – and no one else – lives here. Either they’re coming or we’re going.Ahern and Hutch (an emigrant himself, after all) know this – so they can’t quite do the woman’s full-monty naked hostility to foreigners. They have to pander to anti-immigrant sentiment while inserting ifs and buts: yeah but no but yeah.They want to feed off – or at least not challenge – the woman’s big narrative: that the Irish are being replaced on their own little island and that Irish culture is “gone”. But if (as she desires) we close the borders, they know we just sink back into poverty. So they perform Lanigan’s Ball racism, stepping in and out again.But it doesn’t work. There is plenty of anti-Black prejudice in Ireland but it is not structural: we don’t have a history of Black slavery as the United States does, of genocide against an indigenous Black population as Australia does or of colonial overlordship in Africa and the Caribbean as Britain does. It’s hard to present as an explicit political offering the position that Ahern and Hutch are hinting at: that we welcome immigrants so long as they are not black. And even if anyone could manage it, it would not be enough for that woman and the substantial body of voters she represents. For those voters there is an absolute binary: Us and Them. They don’t really have much of a clue about Us – their grasp on Irish history and culture is weak. But they damn well know who They are – the whole, vast lot of everyone from everywhere else. Seeking to appease such voters by sorting migrants by race into good and bad categories is not just morally obnoxious. It ends with the appeaser, like Ahern, being chased from the door.