This is sometimes an uncivilised country, but it has its consolations and one of them is that it is one of the few European states where there is no substantial party of the racist right, writes Fintan O'Toole
For all the tensions generated by the mishandling of immigration issues, we do not have a Jean Marie Le Pen or even a Nick Griffin. The Immigration Control Platform has been a miserable failure and the explicitly fascist right is marginal in the extreme.
It is easy to drift along thinking that Ireland is fundamentally intolerant of racism and bigotry. Then small but very public happenings suggest that it is more accurate to say that Ireland is in fact indifferent to racism and bigotry. There were two such incidents in the last week and they made me wonder whether our culture has become incapable of recognising vicious prejudice.
Ian Paisley's attack on Brian Cowen generated a lot of publicity. It was rightly condemned for its stupidity and vulgarity and Brian Cowen was rightly praised for his elegant reaction. It was barely noticed, however, that Paisley's insults were far nastier and far more calculated than they seemed. Barely concealed behind them was a long history of racist insult.
Paisley wanted to gee up his supporters for what he thought was going to be a potentially triumphant election campaign. It is not at all surprising and therefore not at all significant, that he should conjure up a devil figure with which to scare them. What is significant is that he homed in, not just on a man who probably means relatively little to the average DUP voter, but on a very specific part of his anatomy.
Paisley is the most experienced and self- conscious exponent of traditional oratory on this island. He is steeped in both Biblical imagery and old anti-Catholic invective. He knew exactly what he was doing when he chose to ponder, not just Brian Cowen's general appearance, but the apparently bizarre issue of "the reason his lips were so thick" - what he was doing, without getting himself into trouble for explicit bigotry, was drawing on a deep well of pseudo-scientific racism.
In the language of racism, thick lips speak volumes. In the 19th century, racial types could be classified by their physiognomy. One look at a face could allow the informed observer to assign it to an inferior race like the Irish or the Negro or a superior race like the Anglo-Saxon. And one of the sure marks of the inferior types was thick lips.
Cesare Lombroso in his hugely influential book The Criminal Man, published in 1876, listed the stigmata of the born delinquent. Among them was "Lips fleshy, swollen and protruding". Such lips, of course, were associated with Africans and therefore with the savage peoples. This kind of toxic drivel reached its height, of course, with the Nazis. Again, thick lips were a sign of the ultimate in racial inferiority: Jewishness. The propaganda rag Der Stuermer noted in 1938, for example, that "the Jew is recognised not only by his nose . . . The Jew is also recognised by his lips. His lips are usually thick. Often the lower lip hangs down."
But thick lips were also characteristically Irish. Daniel Mackintosh, fellow of the Anthropological Society of London, defined the "Gaelic type" in 1866 by, among other things, its "large mouth and thick lips". The big lips were part of the iconography of anti-Irish cartoons and remained so right up to the 1980s. They operated as a clear signal of repellent, criminal inferiority.
Paisley's remarks, therefore, were not stupid but carefully calculated . He was deliberately mobilising a racial stereotype, calling up a visual cue that says what can no longer be stated verbally: that us civilised people are being menaced by an inferior race. Yet, because this society is so indifferent to racism, he gets away with a kind of discourse that no European politician, even on the far right, would risk.
The second incident was last Wednesday night's soccer match between Ireland and Norway. It was a friendly, with nothing at stake. The crowd was unusually quiet. Until, that is, the striker Tore Andre Flo came on for Norway in the second half. Thereafter, every time Flo touched the ball, there was a howling storm of boos and a tidal wave of abuse. Flo plays for Sunderland, who are a notably pro-Irish club, but he used to play for Glasgow Rangers, a traditionally Protestant club.
What was remarkable was not the abuse - every former Rangers player now gets it at Lansdowne Road - but the complete lack of concern. Racist abuse is currently a huge issue in European football, but sectarian abuse by a substantial section of the self-styled best supporters in the world is a non-issue in this blithely indifferent culture. None of this means we are on the slippery slope to fascism, but it does suggest a dangerous degree of complacency.
If we treat the deployment of weapons from the foul arsenal of racial stereotypes as just another example of eccentricity and sectarian abuse as just a bit of crack, will we even know a serious far-right threat when we see it?