Challenging the black/white binary: the need for an Irish category in the 2001 census

The need to disaggregate, and rename the White category created in the 1991 Cencus is powerfully argued by Roger Ballard in his 1996 paper. I would like to respond to that argument, drawing on research findings from the recently published report for the Commission for Radical Equality (CRE), Discrimination and the Irish Community, and examine specific ways in which the ethnic-group classification adopted in the census unthinkingly reflects racist and simultaneously perpetuates them.