The text discusses the plight of the Irish immigrants in the United States in the late 1800s, when vicious, racially motivated attacks were directed toward the Irish populations. In 2014, there was a series of angry demonstrations in Waterford, a town in Ireland, directed against the Roma, a people who have been the subject of attack for hundreds of years. The Roma are sometimes called Gypsies, now a pejorative term. The irony of the attacks on the Roma in Waterford is that they reflect the same kind of as was directed against the Irish a hundred years ago.