Being Irish abroad can be a little like arriving at a party and discovering that the host has described you as totally wild, a divil for the drink and wittier than the love child of Oscar Wilde and Father Ted. When you walk into the room, everybody looks at you with a little half smile, just waiting for you to start cracking the funnies. If you head for the drinks table, everybody nudges each other and makes drinking motions with their hands, a kind of semaphore which promises a good fight or an impromptu rendition of Riverdance within the hour. Woe betide you if you have a polite sherry and make for the door at 9.30 p.m. - you're Irish and you should still be dancing on the bird-table and singing rebel songs long after everybody else has gone home.
I had forgotten quite how much other nationalities love the notion of Irishness until I went on a press trip to Taiwan with several European journalists last week. These are curious affairs, where grown adults are thrown together at the mercy of a tourism board for a week, living in each others pockets and squabbling over seats on the bus like a geriatric school trip. At customs and immigration in Taipei airport, everybody smiled politely and tried to work out who to avoid like the plague for the week, until an official smiled politely and told me that those with an Irish passport needed a visa.
The hiccup was sorted out by various officials pulling in favours and me grinning like a fool, but it served as an admirable ice-breaker. When I joined the other journalists outside in the bus, there was an affectionate chorus of jokes about the crazy Irish who even the far-flung Taiwanese were wary of letting into their country. Over dinner that night, my role as wacky Irish broad was set in stone as everybody pushed the bottles of beer my way and chortled when I innocently asked what was planned after the bar.
In fairness, it wasn't a stereotype I did much to deny, but then, the Irish never do. When it comes to the crunch, most of us are proud of our race image as party animals. If somebody is going to give you advance publicity, it's not a bad plug - think of the poor Belgians and their reputation as the party bore, or the Germans who would be relegated to the role of organising the queue for the toilets.
The Irish usually live up to their reputation too, although I wonder whether this is because it's expected of us or whether it really is a national tendency. True, I was the first one up dancing on the podiums in that night-club in southern Taiwan and the first one breezily arriving down to breakfast the next day, scoffing at the lightweight nature of every other suffering hack, but was this because of genetic predisposition or because I like showing off?
Being Irish must be one of the easiest passports to travel on now that every airport official has stopped suspecting us of hiding Semtex under our knickers. Not only does everybody expect an instant party to break out as soon as you raise a glass to your lips, but people tend to have had good personal experiences either in Ireland or with the Irish. Last week, I listened to a Dutch travel writer describe his delight at seeing a smartly dressed woman insouciantly drinking a pint in a Dublin pub and to his explanation of the special connection between the Dutch and the Irish. An Italian food writer had fond memories of Monaghan, The Chieftains, and the special connection between the Italians and the Irish. A woman from Liverpool had a whale of a time in Temple Bar, but then there was a special relationship between the Liverpudlians and the Irish, wasn't there?
I listened to it all proudly and agreed with them all because that's another national trait; we like to hear how great we are and we're proud to be Irish. The only moment of discomfort came when the Dutch journalist started to praise the Irish for their lack of racism - as a man of Indonesian descent he said he felt perfectly at ease drinking on his own in a pub, something he felt unable to do in some other countries he'd travelled in. I was delighted to hear it but I felt a little uncomfortable.
It used to be I would have been quite happy to agree that Ireland was a country of a hundred thousand welcomes, arms open to all the world, but now, honesty propelled me to qualify that notion. There would always be individuals with a good attitude and there would usually be a welcome for tourists no matter what colour their skin, I explained, but when it came to economic migrants and asylum seekers, the story was a little different.
I described rantings I had heard of in taxis and on late night talk shows, thick with classic statements like "they're coming over here taking our women and jobs", always prefaced by the words "I'm not racist but . . ." I described my own guilt too, the terrifying fury I felt when Roma beggars hung off my arm, terrifying because I could see how easily it could spill over into the kind of hatred that saw a Romanian restaurant owner claiming broken windows and intimidation last week. I wondered about the wisdom of a government that considered settling hundreds of people without money or jobs in ghetto-like "flotels" and congratulated Australia on their immigration policy.
It was a slightly awkward moment. I didn't like giving my country such a bad name, particularly to a cabal of travel writers, and quite clearly they didn't particularly want to hear it. Amidst any racial back-slapping and bonhomie, certain truths and accuracies tend to get blurred and forgotten - those that enjoy the drinking Irish myth don't really want to hear about the affects of alcoholism, and the Irish as party animal can all too easily become a stereotype of the Irish as feckless and irresponsible. Bad qualities like our current record on racism also tend to get brushed under the rug because they just don't fit with the idea of the Irish held by other countries and prized by us - good-humoured, hospitable, easy-going charmers with a penchant for dancing, stout and creating boy bands.
We're lucky to be a country with such a good public relations officer, welcomed with open arms wherever we travel by people just waiting for the good times to roll. But while we're busy prizing our own great qualities, it might be an idea to start really celebrating our own pride in ourselves. Being proud to be Irish is a kind of healthy jingoism that should be nurtured because then we might start making sure that there's something there to be proud of. I want to continue slapping myself on the back and I want to continue being liked and admired by other countries, but how much longer can that last? All too soon we might just arrive at that party to find that everybody's dreading the arrival of the racist, loud-mouthed, lager lout who wouldn't welcome anybody into her own home.
Louise East can be contacted at wingit@irish-times.ie