Is racism a sectarian issue in the North? Isn't everything, you might wearily conclude? But are the battered bodies of members of Ulster's black and minority ethnic communities fair game in the furtherance of ancient Irish tribal agendas?
The disturbing rise in recorded racist attacks was referred to in last week's Irish Times series marking the 1994 ceasefire: "Loyalist residents of Donegall Pass have been warned by way of leaflet against the 'yellow peril' of the significant Chinese community in south Belfast and the 'threat' such people are held to pose to the ethnic purity of British Ulster.
In nearby decaying Sandy Row, a new apartment block, home to a mix of middle-income Catholics, Southerners, and some people from abroad, is referred to disparagingly as Vatican Square and has been attacked. Estate agents in the loyalist paramilitary-strong Village area in south Belfast have been warned off letting property to ethnic minorities . . ."
All perfectly factually accurate. But is not the impression created that racism, Northern Ireland-style, is a peculiarly Protestant disease? Other reports have more blatantly attempted to lay the charge of racism at the majority community's door alone. Are attacks on people of colour not just another manifestation of Ulster Protestants' "Afrikaner mentality"?
This unsubtle fingering of an ethno-political group is not just itself vaguely racist, it is bunkum. Even veteran republican Danny Morrison admitted on BBC radio recently that the Catholic/nationalist community is in no position to preach. Belfast might not be the "racist capital of Europe" as hyperbolically claimed but racial assaults do, depressingly, take place on the Falls as well as the Shankill. They take place too against Portuguese and Lithuanian meat packers in largely Catholic Dungannon, but that is in rural Ulster, far from most London correspondents' luxury hotels.
There is a displacement factor at work, a nasty side-effect of 10 years of relative peace. Now that attacks on "the other side" have become politically unacceptable, the growing ethnic communities are bearing the brunt of young men's disaffection instead. Similarly, domestic violence rates are soaring.
The perception, part-manufactured, is that the bulk of racial crimes take place in Protestant areas. It is of a piece with the notion, notoriously propagated by the late Cardinal Ó Fiaich, that only Protestants are - or even can be - sectarian. I am reminded of the Kurdish PKK supporter who asked me, having been told I lived in Ireland: "So, are you good Irish or bad Irish?"
One kind of Irish is unquestionably cuter politically. For instance, when an SDLP councillor recently used the "N" word in public, it was announced every party member would undergo racial awareness training. When unionist councillors raised spurious objections to planning permission for a mosque in Craigavon their leaderships just winced with embarrassment.
What is the case is that one section of the community labours under the influence of a dominant and extremely pernicious paramilitary group - the IRA - whereas the Protestant working class is tormented by a series of competing factions. To the extent that paramilitaries "police" their host communities, the loyalists do it very badly.
Not that the ethnic communities are themselves above paramilitary involvement. The UDA has long had its sprinkling of followers of Sikh and Egyptian extraction. The Chinese community too has its triads.
Nevertheless, the Belfast situation as described above deserves explanation, even if it cannot be excused. Northern Ireland has for decades been home to small Indian, Afro-Caribbean, Jewish and Italian populations, alongside the substantially larger Chinese community. Generally, relations were good. Some of the new Northern Irish are economic migrants from poorer parts of Europe and the Philippines; others, asylum-seekers who have somehow arrived even though Northern Ireland is, shamefully, excluded from the UK government's dispersal policy. Many inevitably settle in Belfast where limited support services are available.
But after 35 years of conflict the city's demography has changed. More cheap housing of the type many immigrants seek is available in loyalist areas as upwardly mobile Protestants up sticks in search of more comfortable lives in nearby dormitory towns. Competition for housing in Catholic areas, meanwhile, is intense. Furthermore, non-European immigrants typically seek a state (non-Catholic) education for their children.
Hence, the bulk of the ethnic minorities live in Protestant areas, frequently ones where the locals already feel themselves to be under pressure from adjacent Catholic communities. It is loyalists, rather than republicans, therefore, that they occasionally rub up against.
Perhaps a small part of the answer is for the Orange Order - still a significant force in loyalist south Belfast - to emphasise its multiculturalism, its lodges in faraway places like Togo and Ghana. But who wants answers when there is an opportunity to demonise further another ethnic minority, albeit a British-Irish one that has been here for centuries?