The Polish ambassador to Ireland, Witold Sobkow, said recently that many Irish employers had told him that Polish workers were up to 20 per cent more efficient than their Irish equivalents. I don't know who he has been speaking to, but his claim seems utter rubbish to me, writes Kevin Myers.
The Poles I've met are at least 50 per cent better than their Irish counterparts. Maybe Witold had the misfortune of meeting only employers of that exceedingly rare phenomenon, the stupid, lazy Pole (who is still superior to a great many Irish).
No society in the world has been made poorer by having Polish immigrants, and we are richer by far because of their presence here. But it is the very quality of the Poles which disturbs me, with a vast reservoir of millions of others of perhaps comparable merit back home. And apparently - or so the Minister for Justice assures us - we cannot now in law prevent unlimited emigration from eastern Europe to Ireland.
In one sense, this will be wonderful, because the people who are now trying to prevent the inward flow of foreign workers are the Europhile trade union leaders who so enthusiastically endorsed enlargement, and who, denying it would lead to population movement, routinely called sceptics "racists". Being ideologically wedded to the concept of a united EU, they naturally didn't examine the evidence, but shaped it to suit their argument.
Politicians were at the same game. "It is a deliberate misrepresentation to suggest that tens of thousands will suddenly descend en masse on Ireland," Proinsias De Rossa said in 2002. "The expected trickle of immigration to Ireland will on balance benefit the Irish economy." If he calls 80,000 a year a trickle, he should see a eurologist.
Even the usually sensible Brian Cowen started talking ideological eurine on the subject. "Efforts have been made to foment fears that migrants from the new member-states could flock to Ireland. This is not only unpleasant but plainly wrong." Willie O'Dea was at the same caper. "The second myth is that the Nice Treaty will mean mass immigration from the new EU member countries in Eastern Europe. This is probably the most odious of the myths propagated by some in the 'No' campaign."
There we are. The usual emotive terminology of the politically correct: "misrepresentation", "unpleasant" and "odious", as if there were something gravely sinful about considering the possibly pessimistic outcomes of any policy. Stalin and Mao had slightly harsher methods of dealing with critics of their five-year plans, but the intellectual machinery was the same: dissent is immoral and will be ignored.
We know now that our Europhile friends were totally wrong in their predictions. So where do we go from here? Opinion polls report that nearly 80 per cent of Irish people want a work permits system for accession-state immigrants (if, that is, they're even legal).
Witold Sobkow was quoted as saying that the results of the polls were contradictory, because 59 per cent of Irish people thought the presence of "non-nationals" was good for the economy.
Firstly, Witold, I'm sure you didn't say "non-national", did you? That odious Hibernian linguistic confection is merely a cowardly, weaselly-way of saying "foreigner". It should be banned - for as you yourself know better than most, the people of Poland are not "non-nationals", but Poles, a hard fought-for and worthy privilege indeed. But secondly, the 59 per cent of Irish people who think the presence of foreigners is good for the economy in no way contradicts the figure who want controls.
For the moment anyway, most Irish people feel like I do. We have been the beneficiaries of the most talented wave of immigrants any country has been fortunate enough to experience since the flight of the Jews from Hitler's Germany. But we have to be realistic. At what point do we say, enough is enough?
How long before large numbers of Irish people are displaced by more talented foreigners? And don't say it won't happen. Ask Messrs Cowen and de Rossa about their "won't happen" predictions.
In 2004, the US (which is 1,500 times larger than the Republic) accepted 946,000 immigrants - only about seven times as many as we did last year (if we count the tens of thousands of non-European immigrants, plus the many illegals and bogus students, as we must). For the US, annual immigration runs at about one in 300 of the existing population.
In Ireland, annual immigration is running at the equivalent of one in 22 of our existing population. Tell me, all you mathematical multicultural ideologues: what happens on the 22nd year of this sort of population movement? And is it "unpleasant" or "odious" of me to ask this? About halfway through this process, we hit 2016, which brings us sharply to the key question.
The underlying issue is not the economy, but our society. Are Irish people wrong to say that they wish to live in a country which is and will remain predominantly Irish? For we seem to be heading for a demographic revolution, which means that by the time the centenary of the Rising occurs, it will have absolutely no meaning for at least one quarter of the population.
Moreover, these immigrants will not be equally spread across the age groups, but will be disproportionately concentrated in their twenties, thirties and forties. In other words, within 10 years, at current levels of immigration, they will considerably outnumber their Irish peers, and might well, overall, be far more talented.
And what does that spell? Unless you can prove my maths seriously wrong - and I'd love you to - it spells trouble.