Last week it was reported that a racially abused worker had been awarded €20,000 by the Equality Tribunal. If the story ended there, no one would have paid much attention. It was the fact that the worker was English and had been abused by Irish co-workers that propelled this news into the headlines.

The man worked for an engineering company in Dublin and alleged that colleagues called him names and frequently ganged up on him to sing Irish rebel songs. Negative reports about the performance of the English football team in the 2006 World Cup were read out in order to further humiliate the British worker.

It is further alleged that when staff at the engineering firm had to enter tanks or dangerous spaces, they would say “send the Brit in” to make the way safe. Aside from the equality aspects to this conduct, I would have thought that it at least breaches the spirit of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005, even if it has no express provision banning the use of oppressed English workers as coal miners’ canaries.

But then the engineering firm, seemingly entirely populated by Irish workers humming republican ballads, sounds like it should be dismantled and reassembled brick by brick as an exhibit in Bunratty Folk Park. It sounds like no other firm that the Celtic Tiger has produced. One wonders what the Polish, Indian and South African workers in adjoining factories made of it all when The Men Behind The Wire or Come Out Ye Black and Tans wafted over the fence each morning. Perhaps they thought it was some sort of daily government broadcast being used in a North Korean-style attempt to engender national pride.

The case has set an important legal benchmark. We now know that the appropriate compensation for each individual case of Anglo-Irish abuse is €20,000. The average annual population of Ireland has been, say, 5m, with many millions more abroad. If one multiples that over the last 600 years, then brings a class action on behalf of the entire Irish race for racial abuse at the hands of the English, I estimate that we are entitled to a compensation package of about €13 trillion.

I am not sure if that is within the jurisdiction of the tribunal, or whether we would need to start the action in the district court. As part of the case we will naturally be seeking injunctive relief to prevent any English football supporters abusing our soccer team, and any English tourists singing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot in Temple Bar.

Of course there is a serious side to the story. The worker claimed that the abuse was so bad that he was forced to eat his lunch in his car rather than in the canteen. If he had been African rather than English there would have been outrage. The fact that so many of us Irish readers chuckled over the details suggests we may be more racist that we think.

Is it possible that we harbour such a deep-seated resentment against the English that we have become blind to our own racism? For example, when it was suggested that God Save the Queen be played at Croke Park before an Ireland v England rugby match, the country went into a paroxysm of self-analysis that suggests we are still not comfortable in our relationship with our nearest neighbour.

We have certainly come a long way from the No Irish Need Apply signs of 19th century New York, so the real lesson from this case may be our reaction to it. It also raises the interesting question as to where the law should draw the line between legitimate banter at work and racial abuse.

In our compensation culture there are undoubtedly cases brought for what in the past would have been viewed as workplace play-acting. Everyone will have their own view as to whether the English worker should have tried to put up with the abuse or whether he was right to seek compensation for it.

The fact that his former employer now has to stump up €20,000 means other employers will pay much more attention to how foreigners on their workforce are treated. Thus in the void left by the breakdown of community and a sense of national ethics, lawyers are left to set the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable in normal human interaction.

In a related story last week it was reported that more than 300 people have been prosecuted in Ireland under a new law against sending lewd and offensive messages. The Communications Regulation Act, 2007 makes it an offence to send by telephone any message that is grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing. There are also an increasing number of prosecutions being brought for the offence of harassment. So what in the past would have been governed by social conventions is now being governed by criminal law.

This creeping criminalisation requires us all to reconsider precisely where the dividing line between joking around and criminal behaviour lies. So the next time Ireland beats England at rugby and you are tempted to text your reaction to your English employees, bear in mind that the text could make you a multiple law-breaker.

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