Try these: "The fact is that the Irish are a mongrel race and, like other lesser races infected with mongrelism, they are unpredictable and unreliable. Few people are more afflicted by wishful thinking and inaccuracy... The Irish resent iconoclasm... The Irish are a cruel race, intellectually and physically... The Irish are great snobs, though it is troublesome to understand why... The Irish raise across Ireland and far from its shores a din so considerable as to compel the reasonable races to put their fingers in their irritated ears."

Fair comment? These pronouncements above are taken from the foreword to The Irish - Are They Real?, a book written by Patrick Riddell and published in London by Hamish Hamilton in 1972, the year of Derry's Bloody Sunday and the suspension of Stormont rule. Belfast-born Riddell, a former columnist for that city's Sunday News, was trying to explain the Irish to the British.

Quite simply, we are cruel, mongrel snobs who make a din that irritates the reasonable races, whoever they might be. Perhaps we are.

But whether we are or not, the extent of British ignorance regarding Ireland is staggering. Kick-started by Kevin Myers and continued on the letters page, the subject has featured in this newspaper recently. Given the histories, relative power and media influence of the two countries, it would be absurd to expect most British people to know as much about us as we do about them. But 80 years after independence for this State and more than 30 years since the North became a staple of world news, the maintenance of British ignorance is not only staggering but suspicious.

No doubt, we can be, like all other peoples, excessively thin-skinned. We can also, understandably if not admirably, forget we are certainly not the centre of the universe. After all, less than 0.1 per cent of the world's population lives in Ireland (while almost a full 1 per cent lives in Britain!). Foreign perspectives, including the absence of them, can give us some necessary proportion. But such perspectives have historically been and continue to be constructed by British media, which at least in tone, still treat Ireland as an unruly province of Britain.

The result is that, in global terms, this is how most people - if they've heard of Ireland at all - think of this country. Perhaps it doesn't matter, although if we are great snobs, it's reasonable to conclude we must be greatly concerned with how others view us. Of course we really ought not irritate the reasonable races with our clamour to forge an identity. It shows a lack of manners typical of a mongrel race. Yet if you substituted "the English" for "the Irish" in Patrick Riddell's list of characteristics - even if, as he did, you did it almost three decades ago - you would be rightly branded, at the mildest, xenophobic.

In 1983, Denis Donoghue observed that "... anything you care to say about Ireland is sayable and printable. The more exacting criteria which apply to other nations are voided, evidently, when discourse turns upon Ireland." It's true. Patrick Riddell, for instance, correctly thought of himself as an Irishman, albeit from the British-Irish tradition, and his British publishers did not consider his pronouncements offensive.

Almost 30 years later, with the Republic economically transformed, the North vastly more peaceful (if not quite at peace) and media hugely expanded, British people's ignorance of Ireland remains remarkably intact.

This may be as a result of deep but explicable forces. Maybe, as Declan Kiberd has suggested, Ireland has been assigned the role of "not-England" or England's murky unconscious. But it's difficult not to suspect that among the British ruling classes, there is a wilful desire to maintain widespread ignorance about this country.

How else can you explain the amazement of many British people on discovering that Irish currency, stamps and passports are not British; that Dublin belongs to a different state than Belfast; that, in general, Irish people are far more knowledgeable than British people about world events? We are far from perfect people - our political, financial and clerical scandals disgrace us and no doubt, we delude ourselves as much as others. But the conceptions so many of our nearest neighbours have of us could not survive even the most elementary education which might be expected of any reasonable race.

Of course, national stereotyping is contentious and regularly deplored. But it is probably impossible to maintain a mental universe without some of it. Think of Germans, Italians, Americans, Japanese, Nigerians - anyones. This renders the world simpler and fools us into believing that it can be more easily understood. Perhaps that's the greatest misunderstanding of all.

Although its marauding goons in football shirts suggest England is especially xenophobic, the overwhelming majority of English people are ashamed of the thugs.

Nonetheless, an inward-looking mentality, fuelled by nostalgia for past power and duplicity to gain current power, lingers in all classes of British, especially English, society. The days when ferry companies operating out of Dover placed placards advising "Channel fogbound, Continent isolated" are gone but the mentality persists, aided greatly by the life-support machine of the mass media. There's a clarion irony about the provincialism of imperial countries. The US, the economic emperor of the contemporary world, is astonishingly provincial - even more so than Britain, its predecessor in terms of world power and influence. Then again, sheer scale, relative isolation (with coastlines lapped by two great oceans) and a history of protectionism at least partly explain the persistence of provincialism in the US. In contrast, the sun has long since set on Britain's imperial days, yet the old mentality towards Johnny Foreigner is kept alive.

It's not as if Ireland is especially enlightened in this regard. Our knowledge of continental languages is deplorable and we know that racism also thrives here. Indeed, the traditionally fraught political relationship between Ireland and Britain has greatly improved in the last decade and, for many people, it has quite understandably assumed a "don't-mention-the-war" status. Certainly, much has changed since the foundation of this State, when the main division that emerged in Free State politics was not along class lines but hinged on attitudes towards Britain and partition.

You might argue that the re-emergence of Sinn FΘin as an electoral force shows that the fault-lines have not greatly changed. Yet, in the Republic, whatever about the North, Sinn FΘin, if it is to win the vote expected at the next election, will do so by mobilising support primarily on class issues rather than on partition. The party's rhetoric will make traditional appeals to Romantic Ireland but in the hard-headed Tiger, such appeals are not central anymore. In Britain, on the other hand, the isolationist (from Europe) v integrationist debate is far from being a sentimental matter.

Rather it is still a core issue of identity.

That the German news magazine, Stern, has attacked Tony Blair's Labour for making Britain "more Third World than Third Way" is telling. Given the history between the two countries, a degree of German vitriol cannot be ruled out. Yet, citing a health system bedevilled by rampant tuberculosis, an education system breeding "the twits of Europe" and the "dull, xenophobic slogans" of the Tories, the magazine, wishfully or not, sees a Britain in serious decline. This is not good news for Ireland either.

But debates which have raged here for decades now, between traditionalists and revisionists, though never quite resolved, at least ventilated core feelings and ideas. A generation ago, Ireland remained almost poisonously pious while England produced The Beatles, dominated popular fashion and fielded a team that won the World Cup. It can reasonably be argued that Irish debate - though censored on television - surfaced and was made critical by the conflict in the North.

Britain, by contrast, even though the North was legally and militarily its responsibility, did not have such a catalyst. But if the Stern portrait is even half-true, the British will need to address serious questions if they are to arrest decline. It is up to them to decide if the old feudal top is stifling progress or if other factors are more crucial. But when a European magazine selling more than a million copies says: "In Great Britain, racism and xenophobia are smouldering like the foot-and-mouth funeral pyres," at least one race is not being reasonable.

As for us mongrels? Well, we've got more than enough to do to put our own house in order. In business, at least, the British seem more honest than the Irish. In internal politics, one seems as duplicitous as the other. In listening to one's views about the other . . . well, we have a great deal more experience than they do. Britain is likely to remain ignorant of Ireland because from its viewpoint, we're too insignificant to count. Fair enough. Anyway, our irritated ears must be almost immune by this stage.

It's easy to snigger at German accusations of racism and certainly, the EU's most powerful state still has its own racists. But that does not invalidate Stern's view of Britain. Reactionary forces are not only maintaining but exploiting British ignorance. In the process, we remain parodied but their world seems petrified. Indeed, in 2001, few peoples appear more afflicted by wishful thinking and inaccuracy. You'd have to wish them well.