"The warm and generous co-operation extended to me by the friends of my despised race . . . the entire absence of everything that looked like prejudice against me, on account of the colour of my skin, contrasting so strongly with my long and bitter experience in the United States that I look with wonder and amazement on the transition." The words are those of Frederick Douglass, a black American, commenting on his visit to Ireland in 1845. Douglass, a former slave, was overcome by the open-door welcome he experienced and the absence of racial bigotry. He described his visit in an article in the abolitionist paper The Liberator in January 1846 (quoted in a recent letter to this paper).
A very different note is sounded by a letter which appeared on this page last Saturday from Sean Proctor of Belton, Texas, who recently visited the Ireland of 1998. He was struck by the "hostile stares and substandard service", which he attributes to being mistaken for an African refugee on account of the colour of his skin. He unfavourably contrasts his reception here with his earlier experiences in Spain and France.
These are, of course, individual, anecdotal impressions, but they do raise timely questions about Ireland's much-vaunted hospitality and friendliness to strangers. They also lend support to the growing evidence that the jungle of the so-called Celtic Tiger is a less welcoming place than the impoverished Ireland of the Famine era, especially if your skin is dark.
It may be argued that Frederick Douglass visited Ireland at a time when a black man must have been an extreme rarity and he may have enjoyed some celebrity on that account. It is true also that this State is currently experiencing an unprecedented influx of asylum-seekers and that this is bound to cause some resentment and social stress. But this is still a country striking for its ethnic homogeneity: while the flow of incomers has risen sharply, the 5,000 or so asylum seekers are fewer than the number of Irish people in the city of Munich - and infinitesimal by comparison with the millions of Irish who have emigrated to better circumstances in the century-and-a-half since Frederick Douglass rejoiced in the welcome he found here.
Given all this, it is shameful that some asylum-seekers have been the target of verbal or physical attack; and only last week, a 17-year-old African who fled the Congo after the murder of his parents was savagely beaten up in the centre of Dublin.
At a colloquium on multiculturalism and racism organised this week by the US embassy, Dublin City University and The Irish Times, the barrister Iseult O'Malley placed the refugee question in the context of the Northern Ireland Agreement. "If we cannot give justice and respect to the small number of often vulnerable people who come to our shores seeking to rebuild their lives," she said, "it is difficult to see how we can deal with the challenge to our lives that peace in Northern Ireland presents." Amid the widespread euphoria about the Northern agreement, this is a sobering and uncomfortable truth.