A fellow Irishman was discussing the realisation that ours is now the only country in western Europe not to have taken in a single Kosovan refugee. He resorted to Shakespeare. "They keep the word of promise to our ear and break it to our heart," he said.
Ireland promised in early April to take in 1,000, maybe 2,000 refugees. The war was so much younger then. During the week, the Government announced Ireland would take in 150 of the refugees "in early May". Our compatriot assists one of the agencies at the Stenkovec camp. It was hot there as he spoke and the latrines which had been "silent" since last weekend's torrents were making their presence obvious again. That seems to be the pattern at these camps, swamp or stink. He told me that tents there intended to accommodate 60 people on Monday night were holding over 100 each, despite which thousands still have to sleep in the open air on plastic. Living space in the camp is now reduced to nine square metres per person or five times less than the UNHCR say is necessary to ensure health and safety.
At the Blace transit camp the living and the dead now sleep together in an old Muslim graveyard at its edge, while preparations continue to make space there for the thousands more on the way from Kosovo. We were led to believe the Blace camp, which held 64,000 refugees at the beginning of April, would not happen again. Slowly, slowly , it returns like a rash, a blot on the face of Europe.
Had Europe acted in accordance with its promises, Blace need not have returned. Instead, as 8,000 more Kosovans crowded into already overwhelmed Macedonia yesterday, just 800 were evacuated to other European countries. None to Ireland. Two weeks ago Iceland, further away and with a fraction of our population, took in 23 refugees.
Israel, which would have little natural sympathy with ethnic Albanian culture, has taken in 106. It has also provided a state-of-the-art field hospital at the Brazda camp where 12 babies have been born, most of them before the world's television cameras.
It might be just good PR and some may have recoiled at the commemoration of Holocaust Day (April 15th) by the Israelis there in the midst of another human catastrophe, but they are there. Motivation is not a concern with the refugees. But still no Ireland.
Our country, it seems, has extended its neutrality to the realm of compassion. We used not be like this. I am old enough to remember when at school we collected silver paper from cigarette packs to help our contemporaries in Africa. There was not much such silver paper then.
I am old enough to remember how we worked the field with blunt instruments like the rural Macedonians (43 per cent of the population) do now, in families, with horses, carts, just dung for fertiliser, and when the bones of our cattle showed through the hide, as do theirs. They farm at this subsistence level in fields alongside the road that leads from Blace past Stenkovec to Brazda.
And these are the people expected to bear the brunt of an influx of refugees that already amounts to more than a tenth of their country's population. Besides which, Macedonia has a 45 per cent unemployment rate. Its two main markets are gone. Serbia, because of sanctions and the war and Germany, because transport there is now impossible. And the country's very political existence is threatened also. Albanians make up over a fifth of the population.
At 22 per cent, they represent the same proportion as do unionists on the island of Ireland. Since the end of March, when they numbered 443,000, their population in Macedonia had increased by almost half.
Albanians in Macedonia have a strong sense of separate identity like unionists in Ireland. Macedonians fear that if they become stronger in the west of the country, where most ethnic Albanians live, they will cede that part to Albania. Like unionists in Ulster.
Macedonia is a small country with big problems. We should know about that. But we don't want to know. We have reduced our past to a virtual history. It has become a prop for designer commemoration when we remember our catastrophies with the sentimentality that extends no further than the moment.
Even a past as recent as the last century, when tens of thousands of our people were forced to become illegal economic refugees in the US, has been ignored.
Our policy on refugees seems to be shaped by the thugs on our streets rather than a memory of our own huddled masses.