Christmas TV is about old movies and great escapes - Casablanca, Colditz, the Berlin Wall. Once upon a time, film makers knew that everyone in the audience believed freedom and liberty were values to be cherished, so from the first frame, viewers were always on side. Escapees were the good guys; those who tried to stop them would eventually meet their doom.
Good and evil are more complicated these days. But Wednesday's TV news couldn't resist the age-old conventions when they produced "Escape From Calais". Over 500 asylum-seekers were fleeing through the Channel Tunnel tracked by armed police and sniffer dogs. This path led to freedom; the other to uncertain fate.
A Eurotunnel spokeswoman said their guards "had no chance". All of a sudden, the conventions were reversed. The forces of law and order were at risk, apparently, from anonymous "hordes", "swarms", and the usual watery words used to describe more than two asylum-seekers in one place at one time. Gendarmes arrived like the Seventh Cavalry, just in time to save Britain from two "tidal waves" of unwanted guests. This was the Hollywood cowboy genre before anyone read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee. No one told their stories, or even mentioned their names. It took eight hours to round them up, saving Eurotunnel a fine of well over £1 million sterling, or £2,000 per asylum-seeker who might have made it through.
Europe has set about redefining principles of freedom and liberty so that non-Europeans are now more heavily regulated. The regulations are so tough it is difficult to abide by them, with the result that some asylum-seekers and many economic migrants are criminalised; if the Kalendergill and Gular families had avoided their dreadful container, that might well have been their fate.
Justice Ministers such as Mr O'Donoghue mouth the usual palaver about people not having their papers in order, as though everyone in the world was born literate and able to negotiate often corrupt systems. Speaking on Prime Time soon after the Kalendergill and Gular tragedy, he used the same old language, the same old pride. Meanwhile, he is readying up his Nigerian re-admission agreement, which proposes to return such families to the country where you can be stoned to death for taking a lover.
Bertie Ahern's words went unheralded after the container tragedy when he pointed out that the ultimate solution was to deal with people's problems in their place of origin. Solve the structural problems in troubled regions and you solve the challenge of migration.
The "keep-them-out but give-them-aid" argument is a perfect example of long-fingering the issue, and getting it wrong financially. Like notions of freedom and liberty, it is a case of logic stuck in reverse. The largest contributors to local economies remain the people it has sent into the richer world. Immigrants to Ireland, Europe and North America are currently sending home more than three times the total amount of aid spent by Western governments and agencies. They may represent cheap labour in some European economies, but they save governments billions of euro in foreign aid.
Europe, not asylum-seekers, created the gap in the market that entrepreneurial traffickers spotted and exploited, with often fatal consequences. Europe created or tolerated the conditions for political failure that make it necessary for people to leave home and take risks most Europeans don't want to imagine.
There is little doubt that fairer distribution of wealth, solving Third World debt, bringing justice to communities in Eastern Europe such as the Roma Gypsies or the Kurds, and regulating the forces of global capitalism would help people stay at home, which is what they want to do.
As yet, the Irish Government has not pursued this radical policy in European and international forums. It has not challenged the World Bank, argued the toss with the United States, or otherwise persuaded affluent countries to turn history on its head, by giving people a fair deal in their own backyard. Nor has it challenged the world markets to introduce fair trade policies and a tithing of profits to disadvantaged countries.
If anyone needed confirmation that Europe's restrictive immigration practices don't work, this is it. Such inflexibility dooms Europe's efforts to rationalise immigration policy.
Too many people have invested too much political credibility defending a system that simply can't work.
Forces of reason have had little impact on European policies. Freedom, liberty, even the call of common humanity makes no difference to the bureaucrats and politicians who so unimaginatively, so dangerously, put another brick in the wall of fortress Europe every day.
And it is expensive too. European citizens face the prospect of paying for unparalleled levels of security to police the wall the politicians are in the process of building.
The nascent European army may be heralded as peacekeepers for the world's most troubled regions, but common sense suggests its biggest task will be to keep people away from Europe's doors, with the same rigour guards used to employ at the Berlin Wall.
mruane@irish-times.ie