"In which case the discussion about English folk might begin to seem less important.

Though I do understand and acknowledge the point that in the UK there is a specific campaign by the BNP to target English folk so the context is slightly different."

Given that the whole idea is only just over a week old, I'm not really that enthusiastic about seeing it co-opted and transformed quite yet to fit a range of other agendas. The group was formed to raise awareness of a very specific issue. If others want to start groups with more general objectives, or even objectives more specific to their particular conditions, they are of course welcome to do so. We would support and stand in solidarity with those objectives and groups. But at this particular moment in time, the group exists for quite specific reasons and I hope that will remain the case at least until we've managed to get some work done.

Being a monoculture does not insulate against racism. Some of the Irish people I have known are among the most overtly racist people I have ever met - and I'm specifically thinking of Northern Irish Catholics, but I've known southern Irish people who were also quite intolerant. And it's not just since the EU and the Celtic Tiger inspired migration into Ireland. I was well integrated into the Irish ex-pat community in my home town (in New Jersey) in the 80s, sharing an apartment with a couple of girls from Lisburn and Belfast. The Irish blokes I knew were appallingly racist towards the African American people in my town. When one of them got seven kinds of shit kicked out of him because he was overheard referring to a group of them as "monkeys", I couldn't really bring myself to sympathise with his plight.

I remember doing my dissertation about community arts in Belfast about 10 years ago, and discussing with many people how "cultural diversity" there had a whole different meaning and context than in England - it really only referred to the two dominant communities. Sorting out the tensions between them took up so much time and so many resources that the authorities couldn't even begin to think about the racism which took place against the small, minority Chinese and Pakestani communities - but everyone knew that it happened.

The problem is, it's easy to romanticise an underdog culture, and one which has been under threat. It's wonderful seeing people embracing their cultural uniqueness and defending it against past attempts to dissolve it, as certainly did happen to Ireland in the past. But I think something sometimes happens in the collective psyches of such cultures, in which identity becomes so bound up with a particular definition of nationality that even small changes to that definition are seen as a threat. The recent debates on Irish citizenship around the time of the citizenship referendum a few years ago centred not just on the alleged threat to societal infrastructure (healthcare, schools etc) posed by an influx of immigrants, but also on what it meant to be Irish. Could children of African or Pakistani parents, born on Irish soil, really have the right to be called Irish? Wasn't being Irish more than that - a cultural heritage, a racial distintion in itself? Was there a difference between citizenship and nationality? While the legislation subsequently enacted made the distinction between jus solis (soil-based) and jus sanguinis (blood-based) citizenship rights for a variety of legal an emigration reasons, there almost seemed to be a subtext of defining what being Irish actually means, and an attempt to enshrine that cultural definition in law before the indigenous culture could become too diluted by external influences. And in practice, what it means is that, because of my Irish grandparents, I could claim Irish citizenship and go and live there, but a child born on Irish soil, despite being granted autiomatic citizenship, could find themselves deported along with their parents.