Nigerian Taxi Drivers in Dublin: The Preferred Narrative Versus the Lived Experience

Abstract

The liberalisation of the Irish taxi industry in 2000 coincided with the Irish State becoming a place of net immigration for the first time in its history (Ruhs, 2005). Over the following decade, Dublin's taxi fleet increased from 3000 to 15,000, and the oversupply created a highly competitive industry. During this time, many migrants became taxi drivers and a racialised discourse emerged that focused on African drivers (Jaichand, 2010; Maguire and Murphy, 2012). This racialisation corresponds to the wider discursive construction of the 'uncivilized Nigerian' who have become a particularly stigmatised group in Irish society (Fanning, 2018; McGee, 2003; Lentin and Moreo, 2012). The Dublin taxi industry presents a unique field in which Nigerians converge with an almost complete cross-section of society. I therefore focus on Nigerian taxi drivers' lived experience in Dublin and examine how they interpret and respond to racism. The data for this qualitative research is sourced through in-depth interviews with twenty-eight Nigerian taxi drivers and taxi rank observation. I also draw on the findings of my master's dissertation, which was based on interviews with ten Irish taxi drivers and customers (O'Keeffe, 2013), as well as my own experience driving a taxi in Dublin for eleven years (2002-2013). I incorporate Michel Laguerre's (1999) spatial framework to establish how the various spatial sites that Nigerians occupy in the industry are experienced. The theoretical framework incorporates Gramsci's 'hegemonic theory' (1971) and Foucault's 'governmentality' (1991) to examine the relationship of 'race' to power in the Irish State and the conduct of the self. I examine the dominant hegemonic discourses, or 'regimes of truth', that establish and reproduce racism through three main theoretical strands - 'race', 'racial neoliberalism', and 'everyday racism'. Philomena Essed's concept of 'everyday racism' (2002) helps illustrate the systemic nature of racism that flows between institutions and individuals. However, it is not only racism that defines respondents experience and I examine the importance of Pentecostalism and family values that help explain respondents attitude to work and individual agency. The interviews took place between 2015 and 2018 and are contextualised against the backdrop of the global recession in 2008, which saw an escalation of the 'multicultural crisis' discourse and the process of '(in)securitisation' (Bigo, 2012). The 'legitimising' discourses of 'incompatibility' and 'security' inform how Nigerian taxi drivers are narrated and, as I argue within, provided consent for 're-regulated deregulation' in the 2013 Taxi Regulation Act (Irish Statute Book, 2013). I examine the neoliberal rationalities of new surveillance technologies that allowed the industry better able to self-regulate and police. I argue this 'recapture' assisted existing racism and the common practice of choosing White taxi drivers over Black taxi drivers. New technologies, such as the TFI Taxi Driver Check App and FreeNow, allowed racism to move from overt acts to covert acts which are now practiced from the privacy of the mobile phone. Having established the conditions of current racisms, the aim of this research is to privilege the ?subjugated knowledge? (Foucault, 1980: 81) of Nigerian taxi drivers as revealed through lived experience. I examine this knowledge against the dominant 'regimes of 'truth'' and the current racialised representation in mainstream discourse. The findings show that although Nigerians reproduce hegemonic discourses and display the attributes of 'good diversity', they are nonetheless continually narrated as 'bad diversity'. Ultimately, respondents are unable to escape 'Afrophobia' (Michael, 2015) and 'the fact of blackness' (Fanon, 1967) to make access to 'model minority' space (Laguerre, 1999), let alone to majority space, practically impossible.