Even in the face of widespread evidence of deeply entrenched societal racism, the old notion of Ireland of the Welcomes is still, laughably, being peddled.
I have some indirect experience of Irish racism, having had, over the years, friendships with various black and coloured men and women. It was invariably their experience that almost everywhere they went in Ireland they encountered racist attitudes, and frequently racist abuse.
Usually it was not an open, full-frontal type of abuse, such as you might witness at a football match, but a much more subtle thing. In a public house a man might sidle up to a black woman and make some lewd or suggestive comment. Not meeting with the response he desired, he would quietly launch into a muttered diatribe, full of vile insults and abuse.
On one occasion a man walked up to a black friend of mine in a pub and quietly handed her a note which said, "Go back to the jungle, you black bitch." Then he retired to finish his pint.
We in Ireland have been conditioned to act in a racist way, but don't know why we are doing it. That is why it is often expressed in such a polite, almost apologetic, manner: "I'm sorry for troubling you, but would you ever eff off back to the jungle?" It is as if the racism being expressed is an aspect of everyday reality. This is because racists do not perceive themselves as they are perceived by liberal society, but believe they are speaking the truth.
Racism is not just bad manners or ignorance. Nor is it in essence to do with the expression of superiority over another. Rather, it is the expression of the sense of inferiority which has been imparted by the colonial experience.
Those with histories of being told they are inferior unconsciously seek to offload that sense of inferiority on to third parties to whom they can feel superior. In Ireland, however, and precisely because we are white, this process was compounded by a confused effort to distinguish ourselves from our erstwhile masters, while paradoxically identifying with them all the more.
The condition became full-blown on the achievement of independence. Once Pearse and the other 1916 leaders had been executed, and their grasp of the subtleties of freedom thereby eliminated, it was inevitable that the initial years of independence would be characterised by cultural protectionism and a backlash against everything "alien".
A simplistic notion of "Irishness", forged as the inverted image of "Englishness", was let loose in the land. Unleavened by the finer impulses of the revolution, the independence project became fanatical and insular.
There was little understanding of the process of achieving true freedom from the yoke of colonialism. The propelling analysis was that Irishness should be defined in a manner which excluded things "not Irish", and especially things English.
The notion emerged that if our cultural heritage was to be preserved it had to be maintained in a sterile condition, and should not be allowed to mix. The racism which we had been taught to direct inwardly at ourselves was now turned outwards - firstly towards England and thereafter towards the wider world.
The racism we see today is the product of these past experiences, combined with a deep unwillingness to think. Racism provides easy answers to complex questions. Rather than face the intricate nature of what drives our fears and hatreds, we focus on the colour of the skin, the accent, the slant of the eyes. This is much easier than trying to figure out the history which has brought us here.
At the same time there is in this society a developing doublethink about the issue of race, a desire to have it both ways. Our ideal result would be purity combined with a reputation for pluralism. Even those voices raised in defence of asylum seekers often appear to suggest that giving refuge to such people is simply a matter of duty: because Irish people have been welcomed in other countries, there is now an "onus" on us to reciprocate.
Surrounding such arguments is the suggestion of a quota. In other words, we should show the world how liberal and enlightened we are by accepting a number of refugees.
This relates to the idea that the solution to racism is something called tolerance, which in turn suggests a belief that we will be able to designate ourselves a "multi-cultural society" if we simply "endure" the presence of a limited number of aliens in our midst. This is a long way from a multi-cultural ethic, and a long way from what would be good either for ourselves or for those who come to live here. The opposite of intolerance is not tolerance, but love.
The idea that we can achieve a harmonious, multi-cultural society by comparison with other European countries, and especially with Britain, is absurd. Britain is not a multi-cultural society, but a deeply racist one. Less than half the people you meet in any London street have white faces, and yet a viewer of British TV, for example, might imagine Britain to be almost as homogeneously white as Ireland is.
Notwithstanding the increasingly non-white character of the population, it is virtually impossible, on a typical London high street, to purchase something as banal as a birthday card for someone who is not white - all the cards in the shops have white faces. Being an extremely atomised society, the UK allows huge numbers of different peoples to coexist without having any real contact, never mind achieving cultural integration. But largely what it manifests is not even tolerance but indifference.
The problem of racism is not to do with race, it is to do with the appropriation of race for the purposes of abuse. The British empire was built on racism, and that is why we are now discussing this subject at all.
But one of the many paradoxes of racism is that it sets the victims of history at one another's throats, while the erstwhile villains wring their liberal hands and wonder what is to be done with all these savages.
Far from representing a threat, the arrival of refugees from oppression offers enormous possibilities for reawakening the self-awareness of the Irish people. Many of our current refugees are Algerians, from whose own revolution emanated the most startling denunciations of the colonial process in the works of Frantz Fanon.
These works resonate loudly with the Irish experience, firstly in describing it and secondly in bringing to life the shadows of similar insights in the works of our own revolutionaries, especially those of Padraic Pearse. Far from resenting the presence of Algerians, we should be picking their brains far into the night. For here at last are our true partners.