The seductive charm of Irish culture no longer seems to work in quite the old way. A céad míle fáilte is not extended to all new arrivals any more. Yet the historical capacity of the Irish to assimilate waves of incomers should never be underestimated. Eight centuries ago, after all, the Normans became ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’. Who is to say that the latest group of arriving Nigerians might not know the same destiny? If there is no zeal like the zeal of the convert, there may be no Irishness quite like that of the recent recruit.

The fear of being assimilated too readily to Irish culture haunted those colonisers who came in the armies of the English queen, Elizabeth I. Their official artists painted portraits of men who had gone native and been barbarised by contact with Gaelic culture. In them, hybridity, far from being a desirable state of cultural fusion, was seen as a negation of humanity itself, as two discrepant codes cancelled one another out, leaving the victim a prey to evil instinct and uncontrolled lasciviousness. On the other side, Gaelic poets lambasted those overlords who were keen to anglicise themselves, dubbing them half-breeds (‘a dhream gaoidhealta gallda’). Nobody wanted to be a hybrid in those far-off, pre-post-modern days: yet somehow quite a lot of writers (and, one assumes, ordinary persons) managed the trick.