There is a kind of creeping anti-Irish racism being expressed in the media of late. Letter-writers to the London Times, for example, are currently having fun at our expense with an ongoing, supposedly humorous correspondence about "famous" Irish travellers and explorers. The ball started rolling with a piece on "Tim O'Shenko", and since then, one smart alec has mentioned "that famous Irish explorer and traveller, Mark O'Polo", while another wit has asked "Did not 'Arry O'Nassis make his first fortune selling cigars to New York's Irish community?"

All relatively harmless, no doubt. On a more serious level however is the story about the sacking of the New Jersey state police chief, Colonel Carl Williams, because of his assertion that race is a factor in the drug trafficking trade. Colonel Williams was summarily sacked after suggesting that blacks and Hispanics were more likely than whites to be involved in the cocaine and marijuana markets.

In a newspaper interview, Williams said it would be naive not to recognise that race is a factor in drug activity in New Jersey: "Two weeks ago, the president of the United States went to Mexico to talk to the president of Mexico about drugs. He didn't go to Ireland. He didn't go to England."

Williams went on to say that the drugs problem most likely involves a minority group: "They aren't going to ask some Irishman to be part of their gang because they don't trust him."

These are foul slurs on Irish identity, honesty, and our long and valuable experience with alcohol, but let us leave that aside for the moment.

Colonel Williams also said that "If you are looking at the methamphetamine market, that seems to be controlled by the motorcycle gangs, which are basically white...if you are looking at heroin and stuff like that, your involvement then is more or less Jamaican."

I do not know why white community leaders were not instantly up in arms regarding this highly insensitive comment, nor why motorcycle community interest groups did not instantly voice strong objections to this slur on their harmless pastime. But Colonel Williams lost his job so quickly that it hardly matters. His remarks were published last Sunday, and he was fired on Monday.

Neither, of course, does it matter whether or not he could back up his statements with facts and statistics. New Jersey Governor Whitman, who gave him the sack, presumably did not have the time nor the inclination to ask him. Since his remarks upset minorities he had to go.

But if what Colonel Williams said turns out to be true, what all right-thinking Americans should be debating is how to end the unfair carving-up of the valuable drugs trade.

The solution may lie for example in the appointment of "quota officers" whose job it would be to ensure that all the different races are fairly and evenly represented when it comes to securing drug-dealing jobs, and that the more lucrative markets (in heroin and crack cocaine, presumably) are not confined to one particular racial grouping.

Irish nationals or Irish-Americans denied admission to Jamaican drug gangs in New Jersey would then be able to appeal to the quota officers, and alleged untrustworthiness would not be an acceptable reason for keeping someone out of a gang. The applicants might have to prove basic competence in money-laundering, physical intimidation, political bribery and tax evasion, but given the Irish historical experience in the US, few problems should be posed in these areas.

You can be pretty sure however that the usual blinkered right-wingers will try to scupper this proposal on the basis that racial quota schemes have entirely backfired in the US in the last 20 years. They will point out that in third level education, for example, the drop-out rate among minorities is far higher than among young white students, because (they say), many of those who take up places in college only because quota law allows them to, find themselves unequal to the academic challenge.

But all this means is that Irish drug dealers taking up quota places in Jamaican gangs may just have to work that little bit harder in order to prove themselves.