AUSTRALIA: "It is time Australia seriously re-evaluated its immigration policies regarding Irish Catholics," Australian journalist Michael Duffy wrote in the (Sydney) Daily Telegraph recently.
Baldly reading this sentence, written after 70 pupils from a Catholic school went on a drunken rampage in Bondi, would lead you to believe that Mr Duffy, at the very least, has issues with his ancestry. Indeed, there was such an outpouring of vitriol towards Mr Duffy and the paper from Irish expats and Irish-Australians that the Telegraph was forced to issue a clarification.
The paper explained that Mr Duffy's intention was to parody the "regrettable experience of Sydney's Lebanese Muslims" following a notorious gang-rape trial. It said his six-paragraph comment was not meant literally.
The shocking thing to me was that anyone took this to be serious in the first place. It should have been obvious he was using the schoolboy riot to parody the situation where some people were damning all Lebanese Muslims after several youths from that community were convicted over a series of gang rapes.
On the same day that Mr Duffy wrote those words in the Telegraph, Mike Carlton in the Sydney Morning Herald wrote: "It is high time that Catholic and Anglo-Celtic community figures took responsibility for this disgraceful hooliganism and pulled their young people into line with decent Australians. Nobody asked them to come to this country, and if they don't like it here, they can go back home."
Nobody complained about what Mr Carlton wrote though, because he, sensibly it turned out, made it plain that he was using humour to make a serious point.
But even the Telegraph's clarification failed to placate most of those who contacted the paper. One reader saw what Mr Duffy wrote as "bigotry" and "deliberate vilification". Another said it was an "inflammatory racist taunt".
The Irish Ambassador, Mr Declan Kelly, also got involved. Despite the Irish having a keen sense of parody, irony and absurdity, he wrote in a letter to the Telegraph, "neither I, nor the many people I have spoken to on this issue, find anything humorous or ironic in Mr Duffy's prose".
The New South Wales Anti-discrimination Board said that it received hundreds of complaints over Mr Duffy's article and that the response was one of the biggest it had seen.
It was an extraordinary response to 106 words written in jest, albeit heavy-handed, by an Irish-Australian.
There has been anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry in the past in Australia. There were many places that did not hire Irish Catholics. Former prime minister Mr Paul Keating found that prejudice still prevalent up to the 1970s at least. In 1977 he said: "I resent it. You wouldn't have these doors closed against you if you weren't a tyke."
But that was a quarter-century ago and the fight for assimilation and acceptance is a battle that has been won. The Irish influence in Australia is far greater than it is in America. Irish names now abound in the police, judiciary, journalism, business, all facets of everyday life.
Sydney, amongst a great many Irish-derived names, has O'Connell Street in the city centre and suburbs called Killarney Heights, Clontarf and Westmead. There is a suburb of Canberra called O'Connor. Melbourne's main thoroughfare is Collins Street.
The federal Employment Services Minister, Mr Tony Abbott, recently spoke of what he called a "tectonic shift" in Australian politics. (In case you were wondering, there is also a federal minister called Costello, pronounced in the American way).
What Mr Abbott was talking about was "the increasing Catholicisation of the Coalition", and that "of the third Howard government's 42 frontbenchers, 13 are Catholic".
In a country where the biggest single religion is Catholicism (27 per cent), that figure should not be surprising, but previously the Australian Labor Party was always seen as the natural home for Irish and other Catholic immigrants.
Many people assume that Mr Keating was the first Catholic prime minister of Australia, but in fact Mr James Scullin was PM in 1929. His successor in 1932, Mr Joseph Lyons, was also Catholic and leader of the conservative United Australia Party.
In New South Wales, the last five leaders of the Liberal party have been Catholics. In Victoria, the current leaders of all three major parties are Catholic. Two are of Irish origin, one Lebanese.
There is still some residual idea in Australia that being Irish is a funny thing. The Australian newspaper recently illustrated a fawning article on Ireland's It industry with a leprechaun holding a computer.
When getting our daughter immunised we told the doctor that some of the shots are given at different times in Ireland than Australia. "They do things backwards in Ireland," he said, laughing.
These incidents are down to ignorance and bad manners though, not bigotry. Recognising that, and correcting it when we can, will save a lot of unnecessary grief.