I am Irish and I grew up with the myth Ireland was a country devoid of racism and that we welcomed everyone no matter what their color, creed, beliefs (so long as they were white, conservative Catholics
;-)). Ireland had always been a poor country of emigrants so immigration was never a problem - until the early 1990s, when people started coming to Ireland to work. We then discovered that even we had our nasty little core of racism and xenophobia. Suddenly, we had people of color, who had previously been an occasional curiosity in an almost completely white country. And guess what? They came to take our jobs, undermine our religion, (insert xenophobic cliché here), etc. While the Irish are the butt of English jokes for being stupid, we actually pride ourselves on our levels of education, culture and general enlightenment. For use, racism was something that Americans, English, German, French people did (in fact anyone except us).

 Given the right circumstances, we are all bigoted to an extent, no matter how liberal we consider ourselves to be. Even the branding of southerners in the US as "rednecks" and racist is a form of racism. Who doesn't like to laugh at uneducated southern rednecks or hilbillies? They talk funny and have views that we enlightened folk sneer at. We disdain their way of being because they are different and, at the bottom of it all, we humans don't like "different" people. We are afraid of them. Being different from the established reigning norm is unacceptable or at least gives us the right to treat others with less respect than we would treat "our own".