If you thought racism in Ireland was a recent phenomenon, one of the uglier off-shoots of economic prosperity, then think again. According to social theorist Mark Maguire, author of Differently Irish: a cultural history exploring 25years of Vietnamese-Irish identity (Woodfield Press), the cead mile finite for which we're famous has always been at best conditional. In the aftermath of world war 2, Ireland's response to the Jewish refugee crisis was paltry. In the 1950s, several hundred Hungarian refugees were quarantined in a military barracks in county Clare and were so unhappy with their new surroundings that they went on hunger strike and demanded to be sent to Canada or America. A smaller group of Chilean refugees was temporarily resettled here in the seventies and hung around just long enough to warn the Vietnamese boat people against coming here at all.