Seán Moncrieff: I saw a group of men at a service station who were not Irish and were all of ‘fighting age’

I was driving back to Dublin and realised I needed to pee. It’s not that I don’t anticipate such eventualities. Before I get in the car, I do that parental thing of asking myself have I been to the toilet. But it’s like my bladder has a sense of mischief: it likes to perform the same stupid Dad joke on me every time I’m a few kilometres up the road. Ha. Made you think I was empty. LOL.

And please: spare me the medical advice. My bag performs excellently in all other situations. This is a car thing.

Anyway: the onset of the need prompted an immediate search for those signs telling you how far away the next services are. I’m not one of those people who like to pee on the hard shoulder while all the other motorists judge you and/or beep their horns. Not that I haven’t done it. I just prefer to be judging people who do.

On this occasion, the services were only five kilometres away, which was easily manageable. But when I arrived there was – unusually – a queue for the men’s toilets. The queue consisted of a group of men who apparently had got off a bus. They were clearly not Irish and, as they like to say in all the best neo-Nazi circles, they were all of fighting age.

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So yes: I did wonder if they were asylum seekers. I noticed that some of them were quite well-dressed: and then wondered what I was trying to tell myself by observing this. Should asylum seekers be dressed in rags? For them to earn my sympathy, do they have to look like victims?

You could infer that there’s a connection between all this. People entering the country, taking up accommodation space and resources, while the people already here can’t find places to live

When I got home, Daughter No 1 and Granddaughter No 1 were visiting. Daughter No 1 was a bit fed up. Getting the apartment she lives in now was down to blind luck. But it’s too small for two adults, a baby and the huge amount of equipment babies require. They desperately need to move, but there’s nowhere to move to. They are on waiting lists for apartments that haven’t been built yet. They are talking about moving back to London until things improve here.

You could infer that there’s a connection between all this. It’s easy to do. People entering the country, taking up accommodation space and resources, while the people already here can’t find places to live. It seems logical. And it’s not untrue; not entirely.

We live in a time when we are awash with information. A proportion of it consists of lies and fakery, but so much more of it has been gently nudged. It’s not the information, but how it’s presented. The men in the service station weren’t of voting age or working age, but fighting age: and that implies a very specific thing. That those young men are a threat. It’s a piece of truth, telling you a lie. And that’s enough to springboard into all sorts of other conclusions, to absorb rhetorical questions and alchemise them into certainties.

The young men I encountered weren’t asylum seekers at all. I got chatting to one of them in the queue and he told me that they were from Malaysia, and had been flown in to work at a nearby engineering factory. I was happy to be disabused of my first assumption, but it did leave me wondering about the other people at the service station that day. Had they made the same first assumption as me, but left without knowing the truth? And later on, when they might read or be told by a friend that groups of potentially dangerous young men are being bussed into communities without any consultation, they can say: yes, I saw a group of them at a service station. Well dressed. They didn’t look like refugees to me. “Facts” are easy to come by. The truth is a bit more slippery.