Haunted by the demons of our own devising

Last year Seamus Heaney wrote a superbly succinct two-line poem called The Catechism for the National Federation of Campaigns of Racism: "Q. and A. come back. They formed my mind./ Who is my neighbour? My neighbour is all mankind."

The vast majority of Irish people grew up with that phrase, in one form or another, being drilled into their heads, but when we repeated it, whom did we imagine our "neighbour" to be?

For most of us, the word neighbour conjured up people like ourselves. All mankind was all very well, but the variousness of the human species was in practice a matter of distinguishing between Corkmen, culchies, jackeens and bogmen, with the odd Protestant or Jew to give an exotic flavour to the stew. Since all mankind was, for practical purposes, the family next door, loving your neighbour was not so hard.

As the people of Clogheen, Rosslare, Coro fin, Tramore and many other places have been discovering, the world is getting smaller and now the neighbours really are all mankind.

A vast new nation of migrants has come into being. Conservatively, about 150 million people are living outside the countries of their birth. A minority of them meet the strict criteria for refugee status, but most of them are refugees in the broader sense, fleeing from intolerable economic circumstances. These are generally the product of the global economy and what it does to local environments and social structures. In an unjust world, migration remains by far the greatest force for equality between peoples: remittances sent home by people from developing countries living in the West vastly exceeds the total amount of official aid to these economies.

These realities are now coming home to the homes of Tipperary, Wexford, Clare, Waterford, Galway, Sligo and every other corner of the country. As they do so, we have begun to see anti-immigrant activities move in from the lunatic fringe to the mainstream of middle Ireland. We are seeing the start of organised racism.

As soon as that word is used, of course, many people will step forward to disavow it. In recent weeks, protest groups have insisted that they are not motivated by racism; church leaders, politicians and commentators have come forward to support these denials. Though well meant, this is dangerously evasive. It shows a serious lack of understanding of what racism is.

Just as migrants are always "them" rather than "us", so we like to imagine that racists are "them". Racists are gum-chewing Bubbas in Alabama or squinting Nazis in Berlin or neanderthal English skinheads in Lansdowne Road. These images are not wrong, but neither are they sufficient. Racists are also nice, decent people who are good members of the community. They are people who are quite prepared to believe that their neighbour is all mankind, just as long as all mankind isn't actually their neighbour.

Racism is just one variant of the basic mechanism of prejudging people according to their perceived membership of a group. It's ludicrous to think that this mechanism is fundamentally alien to Irish culture. Until recently, for example, many kind, decent Irish men believed women to be intellectually inferior. Many good, compassionate Irish people believed that homosexuals were unspeakable perverts. Lots of nice, otherwise reasonable Catholics thought it was best not to have anything to do with a Protestant.

To say that they were sexist, homophobic or sectarian was not necessarily to picture them as dangerous maniacs, foaming at the mouth and spewing out hatred. It is simply to describe a mentality and to draw attention to the way it can be changed by argument and experience. To say that racism is an obvious characteristic of the anti-immigrant protests is not to dismiss the protesters or place them beyond the pale of civilised debate. It is merely to conduct that debate honestly. Unless we start with the realisation that lots of fundamentally nice, decent Irish people are, in the wrong circumstances, deeply racist, we will be talking to the wall.

It is tempting, in talking about Irish attitudes to immigrants, to configure the problem as that of a monolithic and static culture suddenly faced with the task of incorporating strange and exotic people. In this way of imagining the problem, whether by liberals or xenophobes, the presence of incomers is seen as a source of either disturbance or excitement (depending on taste and politics) in a closed, secure cultural system.

This gets the reality of contemporary Ireland all wrong. For one thing, the old identity based on Catholicism, nationalism and rural values, was falling apart long before there was any significant immigration. Immigration, indeed, is a symptom, not a cause of the transformation of Ireland. The governing consensus which held firm for much of the 20th century was, by the late 1980s, visibly collapsing from the inside.

The presence of significant numbers of African or Eastern European incomers may dramatise the change, but it did not cause it. The sense of loss, the feeling of insecurity, the uncertainty about what it means to be Irish - all of these things may be blamed on outsiders, but they are in fact entirely indigenous emotions. Racism, in other words, in Ireland as everywhere else, is not a reaction to the presence of people of other races or ethnicities. On the contrary, it is a classic act of scapegoating, blaming the Other for problems inherent in one's own situation.

What we really need to be talking about is not "them" but "us". At the root of the contempt for others which is expressed as racism, there is always a kind of self-contempt. The victims of the hatred may be those who are unfamiliar but its real object is the familiar community.

Racism reveals that for many of us, Ireland itself seems so fragile, so insubstantial, so uncertain, that the presence of a few outsiders might make it disappear altogether. Until we begin to understand why that should be, we will continue to be haunted by demons of our own devising.