Hurt by the citizenship poll here, scientist Mary Toomey returned to her native Sri Lanka. She tells Kathy Sheridan what she found.

The citizenship referendum hit Dr Mary Toomey hard. In midsummer her pain and general disillusionment were almost painful to listen to. This warm, formidable, highly educated woman of intense emotions, an Irish citizen of 37 years' standing, whose husband, Barry, is an Irishman, was now, she passionately believed, being defined merely by her "brownness".

She had seen it coming since 1995. In fact she wrote a book about it. She saw the newly wealthy nation "forget what it was to be Irish", saw a cynical younger generation point the finger of blame at everyone but itself while shirking its responsibility for creating change, saw her husband's peers - the educated "forgotten generation" that kept its end of the social bargain in the terrible 1980s, paid its savage taxes and bore the serial redundancies - denied recognition in this new era, which idolised youth and a winner-takes-all culture.

Not least were the experiences of her daughter, Aoife, who confessed only as she was leaving for a new life in the US how often the word "nigger" had been hurled at her since Ireland's dawn of affluence. Then along came the June referendum. For several years Toomey had been telling politicians and anyone who would listen that immigration was Ireland's opportunity to show what it was made of. Far from being empty bleeding-heart rhetoric it was a plea for respect for human dignity, combined with hard-edged practicality.

"The politicians knew since 1995 that the tide had turned, that Ireland had become an attractive place to come to. Six years ago I made a plea for the green-card system, a contractual system, where the immigrants themselves would source the jobs, get the contracts, make themselves economically strong - and then go back to their country."

The "real refugees", she maintained, are "caught in their own homelands". "I feel strongly that the UN should revisit this whole charter, because what was put in place after the second World War doesn't hold now. Yes, of course, we should respect another human being and treat him with courtesy, but no government or country can take on a world of asylum seekers. Let's stop pussyfooting around, let's stop being politically correct. Let's talk for a change."

And she meant it. When the outline of the proposal for a citizenship referendum was revealed she saw nothing wrong with it in theory. "Where there is a loophole you will always find people who find that loophole," she says. Her mistake was to assume that there would be a period of consultation, a series of comprehensive public-education programmes, some well-paced, informed public debates.

"I felt sure we would be consulted. I was waiting and waiting for the Government to bring together people like us to help formulate a humane, Christian policy, people who were here long term, who had settled here for love of the country or because they had married into it. We felt that Ireland had a brilliant opportunity to learn from the positives and negatives of other nations - Canada in particular - and that we could devise a system that would make us the envy of the rest of the world."

In August she was in despair. "We blew it." There has been no consultation with those who knew the situation from inside, just a blustery debate that served only to "dump all visibly coloured, foreign people" like her into the single, common, despised category of refugee or asylum seeker. Suddenly, it was open season for racism and racist jibes.

"There were people - Asians, Africans, Chinese - who became very scared. Many of us higher professionals" - Toomey trained as a biologist, botanist, entomologist and soil ecologist - "were suddenly frightened." The effect on Toomey herself was profound. "I felt an acute sense of loneliness and helplessness. I couldn't bring myself to go to church. My comfort zone as an Irish citizen suffered very much. For the first time I felt I was a 'non-national' - a word that was bandied around so much. I became conscious that because of my colour we were all dumped into the same pit - 'there's a coloured woman, what's she doing here?' "

The overall effect of the referendum, and the "vigour" with which it was carried, was to drive her to reconsider her future in Ireland. A trip mooted to bring her mother's ashes back to the family's birthplace, in Jaffna, in northern Sri Lanka, became bound up with another motivation: to explore the possibility of relocating there, to a city she had not seen in 27 years, during which it had been wracked with civil war.

The day before she left with her husband, in August, this wounded, unsettled woman said she had no idea what to expect. "I haven't a clue what Jaffna is going to look like. . . . I just know that it's become more important that I establish in my mind that I do have a land of birth and that I am a native of that land . . . and that I have a right to live in my own, my native land."

Her long-ago memories were mainly joyful ones, of a community where her parents were well-known and highly respected teachers, a place where people shared what they had according to their means, where the city's library contained such treasures as manuscripts written on palm leaves dating back to the 5th century BC and where education was sacred.

But nor was she naive enough to expect a place untouched by war. Her father died in 1990, when the war was so intense that it was a month before his children, scattered across the globe, knew of his death. But her determination to find a new home there was palpable.

There is a picture of Toomey sitting at a table within moments of arriving in Jaffna, in early August. It depicts a traumatised, almost disoriented woman.

"The devastation of the town left me speechless. There was nothing I recognised. . . . It was just pure destruction. The men were all gone. The house where I was born was gone. There was no home, not a single blood relation. Not one person knew me in a town where my parents were so well known.

"I was sitting at that lunch table and realising that I was a nobody in Jaffna, a nonentity in a ghost town devastated by civil war. I felt no draw at all; I only felt bad."

To her surprise she found herself talking of Dublin as home. "My head was saying my land is where I was born, but my heart was saying my home is where I grew up for 37 years. I realised then that the right of birth did not give me the right to be content or happy. Birthright doesn't confer happiness and contentment in terms of being part of a place or belonging to a community."

What she realised was that, although Ireland might have failed her and many others in spectacular ways, contentment stems from the community in which you have made your home. For her that is Kill o' the Grange, in south Dublin. "I heartily say thank God for the small community in which I live. Even without Barry Toomey I am a person in my own right, an entity in this community. I am a human being here, a human being who is so fortunate to be amongst people who believe in me, who are happy with me as a person. So does it matter if I have Irish citizenship?"

If anything her trip has reinforced her convictions that the real refugees are those who are caught in their homeland and that this is where the solution lies. "This is why I want the UN to revisit the whole damn charter," she says, fiercely.

"No government should be allowed to destroy anybody in a country. No government has a right not to make it reasonably comfortable for every human being who lives in that country. While we must learn from history, for Christ's sake, we've got to get up and move on." She will be helping with the rebuilding of her birthplace. "You must always contribute."

It had been an emotionally charged journey. In a Jaffna dawn she and Barry went to the temple by an estuary where her mother often walked. "I stood in the water, dressed in a sari, faced the sunrise in the east and dissolved my mother's ashes in the clean, clear water. The lady from the temple took my hand when I broke down, and as we turned around she said: 'Don't look back.' "

Time to let go, by Hindu tradition, means no photographs of the scattering of the ashes and no tombstones. "It means that mother's time is done. She gave us life; we must now live ours. Once I have fulfilled her wishes it is time to let go." She let go. But she has also developed steel in her spine when it comes to challenging racists. "If someone now said to me on the streets of Dublin, 'Go home,' I would take them on, because I feel so strongly now that I belong. Kill o' the Grange gave me something important. May God bless and preserve the little communities of this country."

There are still plenty of battles to fight, but one of the most important questions has been settled, at least. Toomey, who had spent no money on her home since the significant year of 1995, suddenly decided to invest in some new doors when she arrived home - "Celebrations!"

And the woman who a few months ago wanted her ashes to be scattered anywhere but in Ireland says now that, actually, she doesn't care where they end up. "A sense of contentment has set in."