April was the cruellest month. Divisions over immigration, asylum-seeker and refugee policy split communities in many places, including Dublin 4. Closed-door policies created an open season for outing what is worst in us: fear, misunderstanding, entrenchment.
Strangers were once greeted with a rhubarb tart and a basket of eggs; now they face a placard, a grim official and an incendiary device.
The Department of Justice greeted the bishops' proposals for regularising the administrative backlog with a modicum less contempt than it has shown to others who pursued the same line. It still amounted to a flat No. But it offered no alternatives. Like cranky children who refuse to stop scowling, the Minister and his senior officials damn themselves to run in circles by refusing to countenance another way.
It is now mathematically impossible to reach the Government's six-month turnaround target for applications because of the terms which the Minister and officials have set. Yet it's no fun to see them hoist on their own petard as so many problems exist.
Legal, moral, administrative, accommodation and human issues mount up quickly. The only way forward is to reframe. Fast.
The Tallaght Strategy initiated by Alan Dukes reframed the economic crisis by creating a cross-party political consensus. The key was facing the worst head on and agreeing how to deal with it. The strategy achieved its objectives because it also factored in the business community and trade unions. It worked.
A Tallaght Strategy for the immigration, asylum-seeker and refugee issue can be modelled on that template.
Low-rent comments throwing mud at progress sound more like a shock-jock's radio show than a rational public debate. The political capital to be made from skimming the surface of the issue is seducing politicians at every level, including some of the media.
Something balks at the idea of naming a new approach the "Clogheen Strategy". That in itself is instructive. Getting at the worst aspects means listening to the difficulties people and their representatives try to express.
The challenge is what should be agreed. A short-term think-tank of political and non-governmental agency representatives could be expected to address the immediate issues of backlog, short-term accommodation and local perspectives on dispersal. Other aspects require real political and legal imagination with a united political front.
The Government is moving closer to a more integrated approach linking the right to work, work permits and the refugee/asylum applicants. But the prospect of deportations again begs the question of what legal and ethical concepts underpin current thinking.
The Minister himself declared that 75 per cent of applicants were illegal. This is legally incorrect and can't be extrapolated from existing figures because they constantly change.
THE quasi-concept of a "safe third country", the idea that a refugee can be deported to a place of safety if she/he cannot remain in the receiving country, is still implied by the careless use of official language. This term has no standing in international law.
Dublin-based directives have a knack of irritating people outside Dublin. Even within the largely Dublin-based Civil Service, other officials are arguing privately for a different approach. Some view the Department of Justice as an insular, old-fashioned bureaucracy. You can't buy in communication skills when your own ethos discourages the very idea.
The issue of dispersal, for example, is said to be linked to the UNHCR's desire to avoid ghettoisation. Within the Department, however, that objective is linked to a fear that if any ethnic minority (especially asylum-seekers not working and with only £15 a week and nothing to do) builds up in an area, the potential for civil unrest is a threat to national security. That explains in part why the Department has consistently limited the Tanaiste's efforts to open another door on the work-permit front.
Sending a strong message that Ireland is not a "soft touch", whatever that means, can't happen if a Minister is trying to crack the whip with one hand while another is scouring the world for labour. And doing this while shouting about Ireland's economic success. People aren't stupid even when they are poor.
A Tallaght-type or Clogheen strategy must factor in the atavism and fear as well as the generosity and willingness to listen. It must face the consequences of not having had a strong system of local democracy to manage issues which have arisen, as well as the need for agencies and individuals concerned to save face.
Sticking with problems, not solutions, will stop us advancing. For as long as the current mindset dominates, the picture of Ireland as it tries to deal with immigrants, asylum-seekers and refugees will resemble the canvas of Dorian Gray: getting uglier by the moment. The debate is not exclusively about others; it is really about us.
Otherwise, we're set to be trapped by the language of condemnation reserved for Northern Ireland's worst excesses. If the Taoiseach is forced to be Gerry Adams, with unruly local and national politicians occupying the place of the Provisional IRA, the public discourse can't but coarsen.
Atavistic passions stirred at local level; speaking with forked tongues at the centre. We've been there already and it didn't get us far. Will the Taoiseach unequivocally condemn the words of Jackie Healy-Rae? Not on your minority Government nelly.
mruane@irish-times.ie