Surely it can only be a matter of time before Fianna Fail TD Ivor Callely is given Goodwill Ambassador status by the UN? His comments on refugees last week - namely that they were costing the economy £500,000 per week and something had to be done - stopped short of advocating shipping them back home, but revealed some of the feelings that exist about those who differ from the norm in Irish society.

For many years, this State existed in the happy belief that it was not racist, if only because it had no one to be particularly racist towards. Travellers were a different matter, and joined gays and lesbians in the murky category of casual, and sometimes institutionalised, discrimination.

Yet, in a 1990 report entitled Racial Discrimination in Ireland: Realities and Remedies, 24 per cent of Irish people surveyed believed that "people of a different race and colour should live in separate districts". In 1996, the European Parliament's Committee of Inquiry on Racism and Xenophobia noted that the number of racist attacks mentioned in connection with Ireland, combined with our small foreign population, "are indicative of some level of racism and xenophobia, which could reach more dangerous levels if there were more foreigners, in particular, non-Europeans".

Last week also saw the publication by the Higher Education Equality Unit of a report on the position of minority ethnic groups in higher education. Minority Ethnic Groups is a compilation of the proceedings of a conference held in Maynooth last year and its contents are, in some ways, almost as depressing as listening to Ivor Callely discuss the refugee issue.

There is a diversity of ethnic minorities in Ireland. The largest is the Travelling community (many of whom consider themselves an ethnic group), numbering about 21,000; Africans, Asians and natives of the Caribbean number 20,000 approximately; the Jewish community, once 3,000, has been reduced by migration; and there is a fourth category of asylum seekers and refugees. There were 33,000 legally registered foreigners living in Ireland in 1995; there are about 3,550 people currently seeking asylum.

Recent estimates on third-level participation by students from overseas, based on 1994-95 figures, puts the number of such students at about 6,500 - 6 to 7 per cent of the total. Arguably, these students are reasonably well-financed, given that studying in Ireland for non-EU students is an expensive business. But the HEEU recommends the development of greater staff sensitivity to cultural differences and the development of anti-discrimination codes.

Third-level education continues to be out of the reach of the vast majority of Travellers, both because of financial considerations and the perception that they may lose their individual ethnic identity as a result, given that the mere fact of attending third level will probably separate them from family and friends. The White Paper on Education, published by the previous government, failed to mention Travellers in relation to third level; in fact, it failed to mention any ethnic minorities in its third-level proposals.

Contributors to the HEEU publication suggest a number of possible means of addressing this situation, including the introduction of equal status legislation that specifically names travellers as an ethnic group and acknowledges their separate cultural identity.

ASYLUM-SEEKERS face difficulties in accessing education at any level, for themselves or for their children. Of the 1,668 applicants for refugee status in Ireland between 1991 and August 1996, only 34 were successful - and only those were eligible to study here. Yet of 152 asylum-seekers interviewed for a 1995 study on educational needs, 37 held university degrees (six held a higher degree) and 65 had completed secondary education.

In his contribution to the HEEU document, Drazen Nozinic, a former asylum-seeker from Yugoslavia who now works with the Irish Refugee Council, recommends the extension of education to children of ethnic-minority residents, irrespective of whether the residents have citizenship of the state in which they are living.

Additional suggested measures to address the problems faced by ethnic minorities at higher level include outreach programmes, special-access schemes and the employment of people from ethnic minorities in college support services. But what is needed most is for institutions, and the Government in particular, to recognise the extent to which Irish society is changing - and the need for policy to reflect that change.