A report on racial equality in Britain, to be published next week, recommends the establishment of a national cross-sector programme to tackle racial discrimination facing the Irish and other ethnic groups in Britain and a radical rethink of national identity.
In the largest review of race equality since Labour came to power in 1997, the authors of the report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, set up by the Runnymede Trust, which is an independent think-tank, call on the British government to establish a Human Rights Commission and make a formal declaration that Britain is a multi-cultural society.
The report will be formally launched in London next Wednesday, but in a copy seen by The Irish Times it calls for the inclusion of Irish community representatives on programmes delivering healthcare; more government initiatives to reduce inequalities in employment between Irish, Asian and black communities and the rest of the population, and publication of statistics on ethnic monitoring of crime and anti-terrorism legislation.
Over two years the commission, composed of people from the media, police, legal profession and public bodies, collected written submissions, held public seminars across Britain and conducted research into crime, housing, poverty and health to draw up a plan of action to encourage "a tolerant and just multi-ethnic society".
The report says that if Britain is to develop as a successful "community of communities", inequalities - particularly between the Irish, black and Asian communities and the rest of Britain - must be reduced.
There is no single, white, homogeneous majority and public policy on health, education and crime must abandon its attachment to the "majority" in order to encourage multi-culturalism.
Irishness is bound up within the "shifting, multi-cultural reality" of identities in Britain, but the position of the majority of the Irish in Britain remains as "insider-outsiders".
As a predominantly white population, the report defines the Irish experience as having been "neglected owing to the myth of the homogeneity of white Britain, but it illuminates Britishness in much the same way that the experience of black people illuminates whiteness".
Furthermore, the report suggests anti-Irish racism, at least since the mid-1700s, is twinned in British history with anti-Catholicism and for that reason has frequently not been recognised.
"It has largely been ignored," the report said, "for since the Irish are perceived as white it is not readily imagined that they might be victims of racism rather than perpetrators."
The report highlights the poor amount of research defining the experience of the second and third-generation Irish in Britain as well as the Irish-born community.
The few available studies, it says, indicate a continuing pattern of disproportionate ill-health across the community, linked with poor housing and poverty.
Offering a practical approach to ensuring the impact of racism on health is properly researched and recognised, the report suggests increasing Irish, black and Asian representation in research and delivery programmes within the National Health Service.
For the Irish and many other ethnic communities, contact with the police is "a microcosm of contact with the state".
The government is praised for implementing race equality initiatives in the wake of Stephen Lawrence's murder, but the report says that in terms of police stop-and-search statistics and criminal prosecutions Irish and Afro-Caribbean people are still disproportionately represented.
With the extension of terrorism laws in the past two years, ethnic monitoring of anti-terrorism laws should also be implemented, the report says.
It also says the police should engage in a campaign to educate the public about police power.