Is it time for Irish people to ask themselves whether or not, deep down, they are racists? Dr Jim MacLaughlin, a political geographer at UCC, believes they are.
Pluto Press of London will publish his latest book, Contested Terrains and Powerful Places, early next year. He describes it as a study of the territorial basis of nation-building in Ireland. Dr MacLaughlin has already published Travellers and Ireland: Whose Country, Whose History? He has done much research on gypsies in Europe and on the Irish Travelling people.
"In July of this year some 47 European gypsies comprising several families landed in Rosslare having travelled across Europe. Some came in a container to seek asylum in Ireland. In August their asylum applications were refused by the Department of Justice."
Most activists against racism, he adds, believe that gypsies here are on a fast track for deportation. The level of street harassment against gypsies had increased alarmingly in recent months, not least in Dublin, where, when selling the Big Issue on the streets, they were regularly stopped and questioned by the Garda.
Gypsies, according to Jim MacLaughlin, might well be described as Europe's "untouchable caste".
"The recent arrival of Czech and Romanian gypsies on Irish shores raises questions about the position of gypsies and travellers in Ireland in particular and in European society in general," Dr MacLaughlin believes. To him, gypsies could well be considered the only truly modern Europeans. "They already have a lot to teach us about the pointlessness of international boundaries, for they recognise no frontiers. As stateless people, they have travelled across Europe for centuries. Although they had precious few material possessions, they were able to travel widely and thereby got to know the lay of most European countries and their peoples far better than most settled communities."
Anti-gypsy pogroms had always been motivated, both by religious as well as racial hatred, he feels. "In the past, gypsies could be placed on the rack or killed as fair game by huntsmen. In several European countries `heathen hunts' - what were in effect `gypsy hunts' - were still common down to the 18th century. As caravan dwellers, European gypsies, like Irish travellers today, were always prime targets by racists and property owners. Not surprisingly, gypsies in eastern Europe look on migration to the west as the solution to their problems.
"However, states all across Europe now, including Ireland, have been trying to clamp down on this western expansion. This means that gypsies are once again wrongly being portrayed as the new invading hordes from the east."
Dr MacLaughlin finds these trends deeply disturbing. There are, he contends, parallels between the treatment of the European gypsies - now Irish gypsies - and Irish travellers. So far, as a people, he contends, we have not confronted our attitudes to our own indigenous nomads or to those who have come to us seeking succour and shelter. For a State that has sent its own to the far-flung corners of the earth, out of necessity, we seem to show little solidarity with the cause of either traveller or gypsy.
Elsewhere, he has argued that "travellers in Ireland, like gypsies in Europe, have long been considered as `outsiders' and are looked upon as pathologically unfit for national society. On mainland Europe, and here too, the rights of settled communities were prioritised over and above the needs of nomadic groups."
One graphic example of this, he remembers, occurred in Bantry not too many years ago when hired thugs from Dublin arrived in the tourist town to dislodge a small community of travellers by force.
It was not, as I well remember, a pretty episode. Mothers and small children bore the brunt of the dawn raid on their homes. Bantry Garda confirmed later that the cluster of travelling people was as well behaved as any of the settled community. But they were travellers and they were not wanted.
There are difficult issues to be explored as the new order in the former communist countries of eastern Europe makes it harder for gypsies to live their lives and effectively forces them to move elsewhere, Dr MacLaughlin says. Here at home, he argues, the easiest option of all seems to be one of deportation. And as we pursue it vigorously, he asks, should we not also examine the intercounty, inter-parish deportation which is the hallmark of how we treat Irish travellers?
Prof Walter Lorenz, holder of the Jean Monnet chair (social Europe) at the department of applied social studies at UCC, has something to say on the subject too. At the recent launch of the European Journal of Social Work, published by Oxford University Press, which he co-edited with Prof Hans Uwe Otto of Bielefed in Germany, he warned that the asylum-seeking process may be a painful one. Other European countries had to go through this painful process earlier, he said.
"This is why we need professional dialogue to look at the experience of other countries critically. Finding a new way of acknowledging the existence of a variety of cultural traditions in Ireland is vitally important in the light of the peace process in the North. Both issues can only be addressed constructively in a wider European perspective."