The anti-black Irish riots, etc, have a deeper and darker provenance. Search out an article by David McWilliams in the Sunday Business Post (www.thepost.ie), where he tracks the fact that a high proportion of prostitutes in New York in the times after the 1840 Famine were "Gaelic-speaking Irish".

McWilliams says in the article that many of the woman "married up", as the saying goes, by marrying ex-slaves, well-qualified black carpenters and plumbers and craftsmen of various qualifications, who had gone to New York and similar places on the granting of freedome.

So anti-black feeling may have been as much "those swines are taking our women" as "those swines are taking our jobs".

When you think of the current black vision of Irish names as inevitably a cruel remnant of slavery by Irish masters, it's kind of ironic, eh?