We Irish claim to be welcoming and hospitable. We shake our heads over racism in the United States, Britain, South Africa; we wring our hands over sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, "ethnic cleansing" in Europe, barbarism in Africa.

We claim not to understand how people can be capable of racist, ethnic or sectarian hatred.

It's easy not to be racist if you live in a virtually monocultural society, as the Republic has been until recently.

It's easy to be welcoming when we have to deal only with tourists and students and business people with the same skin colour and general cultural attitudes as ourselves coming to spend money.

But now that we are seeing immigrants, asylum-seekers and refugees from non-EU, non-English-speaking countries (especially, at the moment, Romania) beginning to arrive in Ireland in what we think of as huge numbers (actually it is about 1 per cent of all the asylum-seekers in Europe) our racist tendencies are beginning to emerge.

The Ireland that is now feeling itself under such pressure from immigrants and asylum-seekers is a very different place from the Ireland of the last century that exported its poor in millions; or even from the Ireland of recent decades that depended heavily on emigration as an economic "safety valve".

Not only did we, right up to this decade, export our economic problems along with our young people, but there were thousands of young Irish people living illegally in other parts of the world, especially in the US, and we used what political influence we had to get (indeed, to demand) visas for our illegal immigrants.

Not that I begrudge legalisation to those Irish people who achieved it. Many of them I know lived in fear.

But our memories are short and our logical faculties conveniently underdeveloped if we can, on the one hand, call for special treatment for our young people abroad and simultaneously vilify those who come here, usually fleeing far worse circumstances than our young "illegals" did.

We have the nerve to complain that people coming here aren't fleeing political oppression, merely unfavourable economic circumstances.

Many of the asylum-seekers I have met are in fact fleeing from appalling political oppression, and even the immigrants who are here for economic reasons are in many cases fleeing desperate poverty and deprivation.

It really is "a bit Irish" for people to argue that immigrants are taking the homes that rightfully belong to "our" homeless people. This argument sickens me. Where was all this concern for Irish homeless people before the present so-called crisis?

Having worked for many years with and on behalf of homeless people in Ireland I have experienced great support and generosity from many people, but I have to say in general terms that there has been a resounding silence among the Irish people on the issue of making homes available to those who are without.

This sudden concern for "our" homeless people is astounding.

Of course, if the concern is genuine I welcome it. I would be delighted if, as a society, we started to share our wealth more equitably. It is disgraceful that we still have 200,000 people unemployed; that 20-25 per cent of Irish people are in poverty; that the disposable weekly income for a single disabled person on social welfare is £70.50, for an old-age pensioner £78, for an unmarried parent of one child £116, for an unemployed family, consisting of father, mother and four children, £213.

In fact I am wrong to say there has been silence up to now about homeless, poor and unemployed people.

What there has been from some quarters is criticism, carping and name-calling.

It is ironic to hear the very same labels that I am so used to hearing applied to the people I work with now being called into service to insult our newest people with problems of unemployment and homelessness, our immigrant population.

They are now, in their turn, being called "bogus", "undeserving", "lazy", "no good", "scroungers", "spongers", "work-shy". I have heard it all before.

For asylum-seekers it is doubly insulting, for we make them wait up to six years before we decide their status. In the meantime we deny them the right to work, train, educate themselves. And then we criticise them for not doing so.

Ireland today is by any standards prosperous. We are not used to it. Perhaps we have not yet come to realise that wealth carries a moral responsibility to share. Sharing is something we have to learn about. It doesn't come naturally, as any parent will tell you. We have to learn about sharing societal wealth among our own people and about sharing it with people who come here to escape economic and social deprivation and political persecution in their homelands.

What we need now is leadership and education, for it is clear that many of us are talking from ignorance and fear. It is up to government to take the lead in educating the people on the situation now. What is needed is a strong national public education programme to give the public the facts on immigrants and asylum-seekers: who they are, where they come from and why they come here, what they need, what their experience has been in their homeland and in Ireland.

This national public education programme should also give information on who we are as Irish people (our history, heritage, resources and the distribution of those resources, as well as our role and responsibilities as members of the European Union and the United Nations).

Also needed is factual information on our legislation, procedures and services for asylum-seekers and how they operate. This national public education programme should be available to and availed of by everyone, policy-makers, public officials, journalists, the judiciary, the churches, voluntary and statutory bodies, asylum-seekers themselves, as well as the general public, adults and children.

But this proposed programme would need an experiential as well as a factual content. Each of us needs to have the opportunity to put ourselves in another's shoes, to experience for one day what it is like to be an asylum-seeker.

Maybe then we would all be a bit more open and more just, a bit more generous and a lot less ignorant, a lot less judgmental and self-righteous.

Sister Stanislaus Kennedy is president of Focus Ireland