`When I was a child watching Sesame Street on the little black and white in the corner, they used to play a song called One of These Kids is Not Like the Other. My anthem. From the vantage point of more than 30 years, one thing that seems remarkable to me about the verbal abuse I elicited by my presence was its wide variety.
"In the Ireland of the 1960s, which had no multi-racial society, there was no paucity of racial slurs when it came to name calling. It ran the entire gamut from coon to nigger to wog, and this was without the benefit of the inspiration that vast hordes of `scrounging immigrants' would have afforded the Irish inventive genius. I often reflect that given our natural ability for wordsmithing, now that Ireland teeters on the brink of becoming multicultural, we may well enlarge the vocabulary of abuse."
The words of Philomena Mullen on "being black, Irish and a woman" in the latest volume of NUI Galway's Women's Studies Review. Born in Ireland to an Irish mother and Nigerian father, Philomena is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, and undertook an M.Phil in women's studies.
In recent years, she has become involved with the issue of race in an Irish context and was appointed to the national consultative committee on racism and interculturalism.
Ms Mullen is one of a series of contributors to the review, which drew its inspiration from a conference on racism hosted by the NUI Galway Women's Studies Centre.
Writing about the experiences of some migrant women living here, Marian Tannam of the Equality Studies Centre at NUI Dublin, notes there is still a general assumption that "Ireland of the Welcomes" is a mother Ireland who embraces all her children, including her adopted ones.
"However, it could be argued that she is more of a `Hostess Ireland', a gracious hostess to those who know their place and do not overstay their welcome," she says.
Certainly, this view was reflected at last month's NGO Forum on Human Rights in Dublin, which heard that asylum-seekers were still experiencing widespread racist intimidation.
Edited by Jane Conroy and Rosaleen O'Neill of the university's departments of French and German, the review includes a poetry section which echoes themes of displacement, marginalisation and changing cultural identity.
Among the contributors, including a strong Galway representation, are Mary O'Malley, Rita Ann Higgins, Sharon Murphy, Eva Bourke and Louis de Paor.
A final section includes papers on the exploitation of the Third World through global marketing practices, the position of aristocratic women in Rome in the 1st century BC and the work of Italian women film-makers.
An essay on the history of Irish feminist publishing reminds readers that Galway was the starting point for this force for change.
The Women's Studies Review, Volume 6, is available in Galway bookshops and throughout Ireland at £9 in paperback.