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A member of Ireland’s parliament who was pictured in blackface at a 2009 Halloween party will stay on as a member of the Social Democrats, the party leader has said, citing his “unreserved” apology and the fact that the incident took place 16 years ago.
Eoin Hayes, a deputy (TD) for Dublin Bay South, came under fire this week after media published pictures of him dressed up as the then US president, Barack Obama, at a party. At the time, Hayes was the president of the students’ union at University College Cork.
Hayes issued a statement on social media late on Monday after learning that the pictures were to be published. He said he had worn makeup on his face and hands while dressing up as Obama.
“While I didn’t have an understanding of how hurtful it was at the time, I came to recognise that in the intervening years and I am so profoundly sorry,” he said. “What I did was completely inappropriate and a huge mistake.”
He stressed that the costume was not meant to mock Obama, describing the US president as someone whom he “greatly admired”, and noting that he had gone on to work for Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012.
On Tuesday, the leader of the Social Democrats, Holly Cairns, said she hoped to put the issue behind the party. “There’s no way to sugarcoat it, I’m hugely disappointed and annoyed about this situation,” she told the broadcaster RTÉ, citing the many issues that she and others in the centre-left party would have preferred to focus on.
She said, however, that she would not move to expel Hayes from the party. “If this had happened last week or even last year, I think it’s very clear he would no longer be a Social Democrats TD,” she said. “The fact that this happened 16 years ago is a very different situation.”
Hayes had offered an “unreserved apology”, she added. “But I want to be really clear that blackface is a form of racism. It was then, it is now.”
It was the second time Hayes had come under fire after a November general election that saw the Social Democrats energised under the new leadership of Cairns. In December, he was indefinitely suspended from the party after he inaccurately said he had sold the shares he held in his former employer Palantir Technologies, which has ties to the US military and Israel, before entering politics. He was readmitted to the party in July.
While this week’s apology was welcomed by Mamobo Ogoro, one of Ireland’s leading voices on diversity, she called for it to be paired with action. “The apology here was fine – acceptable – but what are we going to do to actually dismantle racism as a whole?” Ogoro said on social media.
The pictures had resurfaced at a time when there were “racist attacks going on in the streets, where there’s people being abused on the daily, when there are migrant communities being scapegoated”, she said.
She called on Hayes to heighten his apology by listening and engaging with those who have been on the receiving end of racism. “Part of it … is how he can use his power, how the party can use their power to influence positive change.”
