Concerns with race and ethnic equality have ramped up recently in Irish higher education, with the introduction of high-level policies and initiatives to address racial and ethnic disparities and inequalities. New strategic institutional programmes for race equality in HEIs are connected with the strategic work programmes of the national human rights and equality institution, the Higher Education Authority (Kempny and Michaels 2021), and a newly-created Ministry, the Department for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (DfHERIS, 2021). Higher education equality initiatives are emerging from under a long shadow, following over a decade of crisis and austerity policies that followed the major financial and economic crisis of 2008. This paper looks at the wider historical, social, political and intellectual context for the development of race equality policies in Irish higher education. It tries to contextualise the rise of institutionalised equality and diversity work in a broader manner, connecting specific Irish developments with global legacies and trends. The paper draws upon several key Irish contributions on the theorising of race and ethnicity and interrogates their relationship (or not) to key questions about equity, diversity and equality in higher education. Notably, considerations of equitable access, participation and success were initially broadly concerned with questions of class (‘socio-economic status’), disadvantage and social mobility, but also came to take on work on the specificities of Irish racism (eg McVeigh, 1992; Garner 2003), with Irish Travellers (Mincéiri) gaining official status as an ethnic minority in 2017 (Pavee Point 2017). How does the advent of institutional race and ethnicity categorisation and monitoring reproduce, repress or redress equality, equity and diversity concerns via a racial or ethnic schema? What does an increased focus on race and ethnicity highlight, promote or stigmatise and what does it occlude? This paper hopes to draw insights from the fields of ignorance studies and questions of undone science (Richardson 2018), as well as theories of race and racialisation, to understand the constitutive role of visibilisation and invisibilisation. It revisits and reviews the new institutional emphasis on race for equality and human rights and as an institutional transformation project through the lens of a critical sociology of race in Ireland (Joseph 2017, cf Bonilla-Silva 1997). In doing so, this paper attempts to visibilise, reflect upon, contextualise and explicate some of the specificities of whiteness that are constitutive of Irish higher education institutions, their strategies, policies and activities.

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