The life of an Irish ex-pat in Romania is worlds away from that of a Romanian asylum-seeker or refugee in Ireland. From the time I arrived in Bucharest in early 1994 until I left near the year's end, I led the privileged life of a Westerner in a country emerging painfully from a stifling legacy of communism.
I didn't have to join the queues of elderly women clutching empty bottles to be filled with fresh milk in State-owned shops. I bought mine in a sealed carton in the expensive private supermarket. In many ways, it was the antithesis of the life that a Romanian asylum-seeker here encounters. But where my past world, and the worlds of any asylum-seeker in Ireland, collide can be summed up in two words: isolation and helplessness.
As an immigrant to any country with an unfamiliar language, your ability to interact and make choices is severely curtailed.
To be without language while also being unsure about your future, fearful of racist taunts and cut off from your family and familiar surroundings exacerbates helplessness and isolation.
My feelings of helplessness never went beyond phones that didn't work, confrontations with press officers who gave me the run-around or shop assistants who applied their lipstick while I was standing politely waiting to be served.
I made friends with other non-nationals from countries such as Holland, Liberia and Australia. There was comfort in the fact that they spoke my language and shared my "outsider" status.
While I made some good Romanian friends, the barriers for integration for me were financial: I had money, most Romanians didn't. If you invited a friend to a bar, a restaurant, or even to the cinema, there was always the risk that they would refuse because they had no money.
For new arrivals to Ireland, integration is done mainly through voluntary groups, self-help networks and churches.
Father Ireneu Craciun, a priest at the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation in Arbour Hill, Dublin, said his congregation had expanded a hundred-fold in recent years. It now caters for 18 nationalities, including Russians, Serbs and Romanians. When the church opened in 1981 there were about 10 christenings per year. In the past two years, he said, he has carried out more than 100.
But integration is made harder by populist anti-immigrant sentiment and calls for "get tough" policies.
Irish people who adopted Romanian children in the early 1990s are sending these children to school in a climate where Romanians, as the largest group of asylum-seekers here, are blamed for many social ills.
Mr Sorin Costica, a Romanian taxi-driver living in Blanchardstown, Co Dublin, recently picked up a fare in Pearse Street. Two women got into the car and began to complain bitterly that Romanian asylum-seekers had just won the Lotto. "I'm sick, I'm sick," said one of them, before asking him for his opinion. "I put on a Dublin accent. I can do that quite well," he said.