And they're off! The great anti-racism race is under way, as Irish journalists reveal how anti-racist they really are, compared with the rest of the Irish people! But first of all, let's look at an earlier racism steeplechase, on the issue of what the law nowadays compels us to call Travellers - as if the award of a capital letter settled anything. After that canter round the course of self-righteousness, liberal Ireland triumphantly found the plain people of Ireland not up to the running, and the Travellers were given the Grand National Victimhood Cup.
It was good, it was simple, and it worked like any good medieval morality play. So, with the Traveller issue now once and for all settled, let's move onto the novice handicap of illegal immigrants, which we call by every single name except that. My own instinct is that since we have such crippling labour shortages, and the illegals we've got had the get up and go to get here, we should create a conditional visa - rather like the American system - by which, after five years of blameless apprentice citizenship, the lot of them, regardless of race, become Irish citizens.
Condescension
That's my instinct. I'm not saying I'm right. I also hope I'm not going to patronise people who don't want large numbers of immigrants landing in their communities. Certainly, Rodney Rice's condescension towards an unfortunate from Clogheen, Co Tipperary on RTE 1 radio last week was a classic of liberal intolerance and metropolitan superciliousness. Why, he asked, were the people of Clogheen against the billeting of 40 illegal immigrants/asylum-seekers in a local hotel with 15 rooms? "You wouldn't complain if 40 Dublin businessmen were lodged there," he declaimed in a voice ringing with 1960s sanctimonious chic.
The Clogheen spokesman tried to protest he wasn't racist; but of course his life's work isn't articulating himself on the radio. Away from the collar-tightening interrogation of a microphone, we all know there's no comparison between 40 Dublin businessmen and 40 illegal immigrants/asylum-seekers in a small Irish country hotel, not least because the former will flee, screaming with boredom, in their Mercs after a couple of nights. The immigrants will not. In Clogheen, there is no bus service, no transport, no money and - most of all - no consultation. The people of Clogheen did not even know the nationality of their future involuntary guests.
Is it wrong for them to rage at Department officials employing the time-honoured tools of imperial governors anywhere: one blindfold, one pin, and one map? And is it so utterly wrong for the people of Clogheen to worry about the health of their Third World guests? (But you wouldn't demand that Dublin businessmen have AIDs tests, chimed in his interrogator, racing ahead in the Complete and Utter Cant of the Year Stakes).
Local values
In part, this is not a race issue. Would the good people of Clogheen have been in a comparable wrath if their 40 uninvited guests were from the poorest, most crime-racked areas of Dublin or Belfast? Most probably. So are we talking racism here or communalism? Are talking about people trying to hold on to local values and local ways which they feel under threat from large-scale influxes of potentially disruptive outsiders?
Such outsiders need not be poor white, black, Jewish, Pakistani: many old but modest communities deeply resent the arrival of large numbers of well-heeled outsiders taking over their neighbourhoods. Remember the term, yuppification? Remember how right-on it was to deplore it?
So it is not even a question of people being racist, if I could be sure what that term meant. According to Fintan O'Toole in this newspaper the other day, racists "are people who are quite prepared to believe that their neighbour is all mankind, just as long as all mankind isn't actually their neighbour."
Well, I think that clears the air admirably: if you don't want all mankind to be your neighbour, stand up please. Ah. So who does that leave sitting? Anybody? Because I certainly don't want all mankind as my neighbour. For a start, I don't want - in Fintan O'Toole's words - the gum-chewing Bubbas of Alabama, the squinting Nazis of Berlin, or the Neanderthal English skinheads of Lansdowne Road. Interesting use of language here. If we can be free to abuse certain white groups in such terms, might we or others with equal freedom also refer to Rastafarian drugs dealers? Or Soweto neck-lacers? Or Hutu murder gangs? Or Islamic Jihad Arabs?
Personal tolerance
Enough. Stereotypes hinder wisdom, especially since at a personal level the issue isn't about race but habit. All I ask of my neighbour is that he bear my faults with the same good grace I hope I bear his. But, alas, it is more than a matter of personal tolerance; for you can, almost anywhere in the world, mathematically predict racial conflict by the local ratio of newcomer to native, when the capacity of individuals to tolerate others' cultural idiosyncrasies is simply overwhelmed by the sheer anthropological energy of difference.
The people who succumb to these pressures, in all societies, in all countries, are normally working-class, poor, illiterate, of all races. When we have closed our ears long enough to their rising concerns, their inarticulate anguish, and sneered at their Clogheen-like bafflement at what is happening to their communities, their cherished ways and their no-longer-familiar streets, we know what to call them.
We call them racists.