The Bigger Picture: Racism is a part of Irish society. If you think that's painful to hear, imagine how painful it is for me to watch and experience it. I am tired of listening to "reasonable" debates about services, resources and citizenship that lack any understanding of the racism that's misguiding them.
I moved here before racism hit the public agenda - when people told me I was insane to say I experienced what I did. Eight years later, very little has changed. We're still having our "debates" - even gearing up for a referendum - with little more public knowledge.
There is no reason why this deeply hurtful oppression need continue in Ireland. Eliminating it, however, will require us to move beyond being morally against it to understanding the real ways it affects our lives and finding the skills to work through it before we tear each other apart.
I have been hit while attending my local bank, stared at, shouted at abusively on the street, told to "go home", and been ignored queuing in a shop while I watched others behind me brought forward for assistance. I have been shouted at by a public servant for "not understanding how things worked here" before I ever said a word. I have been told that while my qualifications are exemplary, I will not be hired as one cannot be sure if I can "perform in the Irish context". All the while, I am continuously told that people admire me, like me, and are deeply impressed by what I accomplish.
It is easy to identify explicit attacks as racism. Much more destructive are the ideologies fuelling them that shape our lives. It might be comfortable to point at a vicious, sub-human beast who is racist. But it makes it nearly impossible for us to examine how we're involved, how it twists our thinking and how it continues to hurt us deeply by separating us from the majority of humanity.
A significant issue here is trust. Racism teaches people in the dominant group they need to be afraid - that the targeted group (Travellers, Muslims, Jews, Africans and Asians) are uncontrollable, untrustworthy and will try to kill them. We act out this fear by blaming them for our problems and keeping them out of our State and our lives.
While some say racism in this State is new, Travellers have been targeted for hundreds of years as violent, drunk, robbing, untrustworthy, cute, abusing the system and dirty. I'm sure you can come up with more. You don't need to be a Traveller to know this stereotype. It is part of society. We all learn it, and it only takes a minute to articulate it.
Imagine you were a Traveller child. Imagine that without ever having anyone say it to you explicitly, you learned this is what was thought of your people, and you, just because you were Travellers. Imagine what it's like to understand your world is a hostile one that believes you are inferior.
With every move you make, everyone - from gardaí to judges to journalists to makers of the school curriculum - thinks you are the problem: you don't know how to behave. If you complain, you are told you brought it on yourself or are too sensitive. Your experience doesn't exist. Society would prefer it if you didn't exist. This is racism - systematic, institutionalised and a daily experience. It is in this context that self-esteems are developed and deeply damaged. We are hopelessly focused on the "others". For as much as there is a myth that black people want to come to Ireland because it's a wonderful, easy place to live, there are floods of black people leaving this island because it is such a hard place to live when you're black.
Although it's commonly believed that our economic boom brought the dramatic increase in asylum applications in the 1990s, people from Britain, America, Canada and Australia have persistently immigrated to Ireland since the formation of the State. In all this time, Ireland refused to provide safety for refugees at all.
Joining the United Nations in 1956 put pressure on us to participate in refugee programmes. Still, we ensured the refugees we accepted were Catholics and didn't participate in programmes in Africa. Only our recent membership to the EU has pressurised us to meet our international obligations to accept and process applications for asylum. Otherwise, we would still keep them out.
Despite the economic boom, we all find daily living in Ireland difficult. We spend more time away from our families and suffer from more stress than before. Many more continue to live without basic resources, including shelter and food. Our lives are hard because of how our society is structured and managed, not because of any particular ethnic group. Although we are fooled into blaming certain people as the cause of our problems, our lives don't improve in any real way when we manage to keep them out.
It is important to have a debate about citizenship. It is a mistake, however, to hook it onto our fears of outsiders coming here while pregnant. If we really believe they have babies so they can live in Ireland, we are wholly unaware of how painful life here can be for black people. The real issues of this debate are the lack of resources for our healthcare system and our State's historical cold-shoulder to certain foreigners. The figures of pregnant asylum seekers are small, and while we can decide to keep them out, it will not fix our problems. March 21st marked International Day Against Racism.
While almost everyone is against racism, it takes strength and intelligence to genuinely do something about it.
• Shalini Sinha is an independent producer, counsellor and journalist. She is a counsellor on equality issues. She has lectured on Women's Studies in UCD and co-presents Mono, RTÉ's intercultural programme.