Ireland’s legal erasure of Catholics anticipated the Dred Scott doctrine.

Evidence

On two occasions officials with judiciary authority in Ireland declared that “The law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic.” It is impossible not to note the similarity of that summary with Judge Taney’s famous dictum in the Dred Scott case a century later: “The Negro has no rights a white man is bound to respect.” — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 127

Categorization

• XREF: Direct parallel between Ireland’s legal non-personhood of Catholics and Dred Scott — grounds the claim that ‘race’ need not rest on skin color.