Is racism in our blood?

"WHERE do you come from?" It's our friendly welcome.

We're not prying. We're just interested hosts. Yet it is one of the most common expressions of Irish racism, according to Robbie McVeigh.

There's more. We sing songs about an bacach bui and the "raggle taggle gypsy". A US emigrant, Gen Philip Sheridan from Killinkere, Co Cavan, is credited with that "genocidal maxim", "the only good Indian is a dead Indian". The leading Irish republican, John Mitchel, supported slavery. Irish Americans called for "Brits out of Ireland, Niggers out of Boston" during the riots on integration and busing.

No, Famine refugees have not been known to extend simple solidarity to African Americans, in spite of the experience of colonial oppression, McVeigh writes. There is no doubt about the ethnicity of Joseph McCarthy, the architect of McCarthyism, otherwise known as "US xenophobia at its worst". Eugene "Bull" O'Connor was among the most notorious of all southern US opponents of civil rights.

The Irish may have been victims of racist sentiment abroad, but there is so much to be ashamed of. Some of our attitudes can be passed off as "imported". Racism is popularly regarded as something that happens elsewhere. But anti traveller sentiment is distinctly local, he says. Significantly, anti traveller and anti Jewish traits are associated with movement. A mixture of fear and envy of nomadism have ensured the travellers' place in Irish society as "a symbolic racialized other", he writes.

And yet, the picture is not all bleak. The Ulster Unionist Party may have embraced Enoch Powell, the instigator of "new racism" in Britain in the 1960s, but the Orange Order has promoted links with black and minority ethnic groups. The Order's tercentenary celebrations were led by a lodge from the Mohawk Nation, he notes, and there are more "positive images" of black people in the pages of the Orange Standard than in any other Irish publication.

We may unwittingly use racist terms like "in the blood". Yet the 1937 Constitution, for all its sectarian and patriarchal traits, was the first anywhere in the world to recognise specifically the place of the Jewish community within the nation, he says. Daniel O'Connell, the 19th century liberator, was regarded as the single most important supporter of the North American anti slavery lobby in Europe. O'Connell in turn referred to St Patrick as the "first Irish abolitionist".

McVeigh is generous to his sources in this, the second in a series entitled Ireland: Between Two Worlds, published by the Centre for Research and Documentation in Belfast. Groups such as Pavee Point, which was one of the hosts of a recent conference on racism in Dublin, and the North's Committee on the Administration of Justice, have helped to created awareness and foster links. Comhlamh, the association of returned development workers, has challenged racist stereotypes of the majority world. The EU has designated 1997 as the Year Against Racism.

Irish people have extended solidarity to those struggling for liberation in other countries, and Irishness has been enriched by the encounters of the diaspora, McVeigh concludes, on a positive note. Irish musicians have explored new cultural forms. There has been little angst about the birth certs of Jack Charlton's football team. It means that the notion of racial purity, in Irish terms, appears "both ridiculous and oppressive", he says even if we are empowered by our "whiteness" in "fortress Europe". {CORRECTION} 96052100127