Sports Stars, Citizenship, and Ireland’s Hate Speech Laws

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The sprinter Rhasidat Adeleke is said to be on course to becoming Ireland’s greatest athlete. She was born here to Nigerian parents in 2002, and seems to be culturally at home in our post-sovereign moment. Yet by calling her Ireland’s greatest athlete her boosters draw attention to a world in which ethnic populations are diluted by people from everywhere, and where national essentialism makes no sense. Adeleke’s achievement is her own. Any wider credit goes to her genetic stock, which is African. The fact that she competes as an Irish citizen means almost as little as the fact that she is sponsored by SPAR, and gives her only a broken continuity with Irish athletes of the past. She represents the severance from our lineage and from each other that is the legacy of the international political class in her lifetime, but to say so is ‘racist’.