A RACE APART

And a happy new year to you too! What will it bring? More of the same, most likely. Bad weather, tribunals, hustles, hysteria and hype. Life goes on.

One thing that will keep on coming is immigration and the whole refugee issue. Already unpleasant people are starting to raise the temperature. They are aided by dim journalists, wittingly or not, and by small pockets of deeply disturbed and angry shits, scattered throughout the country. We aren't all like that, but they make the most noise and so they set the tone.

Racism is an ugly festering presence in a society, and sadly there are few countries that are free of it. Insofar as they are, it's usually because they haven't had to deal with it, much like Ireland until recently.

Of course, we have experienced it, but until five years ago or so it was from the victim's point of view. Hah! There's an irony! Some of those who shout loudest about Oorland being for the Oorish, those who applaud most enthusiastically when the unfortunate asylum seekers are harassed at point of entry, are the ones who also shout loudest about Paddies being hassled and victimised in Britain. (And I'll bet they support a Premiership team as well, just to make things really circular).

And here's the rub: just before Christmas the Observer ran a story on a memo in which Humberside police were secretly ordered to treat all Irish-born citizens on their patch as potential terrorist suspects. So there!!

So, we're all suspect. Like people with dark skin entering Ireland, I suppose. And I'd have expected those who get annoyed about this kind of broad-brush prejudice against the Irish to also get upset about similar tactics against refugees and asylum-seekers and so on. But they don't.

Of course, as has been argued by such diverse groups as the Irish Catholic bishops and the Irish Business and Employers Conference (IBEC), we don't actually have a policy to begin with. Sure, there are elements, usually concentrating on a specific aspect. But to have the Department of Justice in charge is a bad start!

Whistling past the graveyard, methinks.

Well, we'd better get real very soon, because it ain't going to go away. And, as if we needed another illustration of the lengths to which these unfortunates will go, and the degree to which they are likely to be exploited, we got it right in the middle of the season of peace and goodwill to all. As we were swilling and stuffing, 25 Sri Lankan would-be immigrants to Germany were abandoned on the Siberian steppes.

They had started from Sri Lanka, were flown to Dubai, then to Omsk in Siberia, where they were locked in a house for 20 days. A 'businessman' put them in a truck, drove them around for five hours and then told them they were in Germany. They were ordered to start walking and avoid any police roadblocks.

After a number of days walking, they strayed into Kazakhstan where they were spotted by border guards. They were carrying a corpse - one of the group had died from exposure. Temperatures were between minus 15 and minus 20 degrees.

It isn't the first such story and believe me, by the end of this year, we'll have heard others. We'll also have heard heart-rending stories from people who have come to our shores in the hope of something more humane than what they have left. In this, they mimic exactly the Irish experience of the last two centuries - the trucks and freighters are the coffin ships of today, the repression is just the same, as is the pressing need to emigrate to support a family. It is to our shame that we complete the grand-slam of grief by hassling and harassing them when they come.

Let's be clear. I don't accept that the Irish are racist. But many of them are, and Ireland is a racist society, a hard and unpleasant place for anyone who is visibly different. Buried beneath our smugness and self-satisfaction we should be able to remember our own pain, and how we felt, each one of us, when we arrived in the UK to find that, indeed, each Irish person was a suspect, was made to feel unwelcome and untrustworthy and undesirable.

And when we remember, perhaps we can start to confront this appalling and demeaning demon that we seem to be carrying on our shoulders.

That said, two other things crossed my desk that seemed interesting at the time. The first is the news that scientists, including a group in UCD, have found that the AIDS virus crossed from chimpanzees to humans as long ago as the 17th century, and was well established in humans by the 1920s. That changes a few theories, I'll bet.

They worked this out by looking at how the virus changed between 1977 and 1998, then working backwards through a 'molecular clock analysis'. Don't ask - I can't really explain, except to say that secondary DNA evolves at a constant rate. So, you can time developments.

They found that all the known sub-types of the disease already existed by 1930. They compared HIV with SIV, the simian disease, and found that they derived from a common ancestor around 1675.

Interested? Check it out on the FASEB website: www.fasebj.org. FASEB stands for Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

And finally, the British journalist and author Will Hutton wrote in the Observer about what he called 'America's right wing coup'. He says "it is now clear beyond any doubt that the winner of the (US) Presidential election was Al Gore. His final lead (in Florida) promises to be in thousands. Nationally he leads by over half a million votes. What has happened is beyond outrage".

There is more in that vein, and it's hard to disagree. He says that "Bush won power despite losing, and critically he only pulled off this feat because the Republicans' control the Supreme Court. The Right has subverted pivotal US institutions to win power". Hutton links this with the attempts to discredit and impeach Clinton. In his view, "all of us should be frightened for the consequences".

We'll hear more about this. But remember, it wasn't the thousands of tons of bombs that got rid of Slobodon Milosevic. It was the fact that his opponent got more votes than him. And there's one thing you could always say for Saddam Hussein - he always got the highest vote. Even he knew enough to ensure that.