A recent letter-writer to this newspaper said I had reported that Ireland was being over-run by Muslims. Well, I never said any such thing, because we're not, writes Kevin Myers.
By European standards, we have few Muslims, and few immigrants generally. But we did have the experiment of an Irish Ireland, and thoroughly informative it was too: in the 40 years between 1918 to 1958, we went from empire to quagmire, from which the enterprising and the enquiring all fled, shrieking.
Only by opening our doors to foreign money and foreign people did we transform our economy, and in many areas of life - such as the health service - we are now utterly immigrant-dependent. Moreover, we can now draw on the experiences of immigration in other societies as we plan our future. Have we any intention of doing so? Well, we were the last state in Europe to build motorways; did we learn from the experience of others? Of course not - that would have been cheating. Hence the absence of median crash barriers, and hence the near-catastrophic crash near Dublin airport on Sunday. The National Roads Authority now says it is going to reconsider its no-barrier policy - which presumably means the NRA believed that Irish drivers are so skilled that they never crash: which is why, proportionately, we have the highest number of road deaths in Europe, poor Portugal excepted.
So the so-called debate on immigration has consisted of the usual sanctimonious, sermonising paddywhackery: we were once emigrants too, y'know, we mustn't be racist, migration is good for everyone - the pious dirge concluding with a list of famous emigrants who benefited their host countries: Mother Teresa, Marie Curie, Albert Schweitzer et cetera, et yawn. There's another list of famous emigrants not mentioned there - such as Adolf Hitler, the Austrian who made it good in Germany, Felix Dzernhisky, the Pole who founded the Cheka (the Soviet secret police), William Joyce, who ennobled himself in Teutonic exile to become Lord Haw Haw, Mohammed Atta and his merry men whose stay in the US ended somewhat abruptly on September 11th, 2001, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian immigrant to Iraq, and Robert Maxwell, a Jewish-Czech immigrant to Britain.
In other words, we can all play that game, and it tells us nothing. Migration neither ennobles nor corrupts, and only a bigot or a fool would maintain Ireland hasn't benefited from incomers (though I wish that Pearse's dad had stayed in Birmingham - where young Patrick could have given his lifeblood for Aston Villa - and that James Connolly had confined his sub-Marxist musings to Clydeside). However, it would be churlish not to accept that Irish life has been enhanced by such as Jason Sherlock and the preposterously, ludicrously marvellous Ó hAilpín dynasty.
But if you think that only good results from immigration, consider the situation in the Ó hAilpín maternal homeland, which is now bitterly divided between aboriginal Fijian and immigrant Indian stock. So even as we acknowledge that, on principle, immigration refreshes and renews, we must also consider the practical aspects: how many, and are they culturally assimilable? And how will we tackle such issues? Bravely? Or will we gag anyone who wants to address the negative consequences of immigration with self-righteous and hysterical accusations of racism?
Well, we can follow the example of the National Roads Authority and wait for the demographic equivalent of a car careering over the median into oncoming vehicles before we finally wonder whether our policies are right; or we can actively consider other people's experiences. Take Bradford West in England, for example, where the former Tory party candidate, Haroon Rashid, recently explained why it made sense for the Tories to nominate a man of his racial background. "It is 60 per cent ethnic minority in Bradford West." Hmm. "Sixty percent" doesn't much sound like a minority to me. Forty years ago, when Pakistani immigrants were arriving in Bradford, such a demographic statistic would have been declared impossible; moreover, any suggestion it might become reality - within barely more than a generation - would have been denounced by the Guardian as hysterically racist. So: which Irish town is going to be nominated by immigrants as the Irish Bradford? Will Limerick West, Portlaoise West or Drogheda West find itself having a 60 per cent Asian "minority" in 2044? Because it's certainly not the host community which decides these things.
Yes, I can already hear the spluttering that this won't happen. Oh, indeed - just as it was never going to happen in Yorkshire, either. Now, I've visited Bradford, and I'm sure it's a far more interesting place because of its 60 per cent "minority": pre-immigration England was probably as dull as pre-immigration Ireland. But that aside, how many white Christians in Bradford West enjoy being a minority in their own town? And the residents of which Irish town are now volunteering for a comparable future?
Moreover, being "interesting" takes many forms. As I've said before, 1,200 British Muslims are graduates of Taliban/al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. An opinion poll after 9/11 revealed that 40 per cent of Britain's 2 million Muslims backed Osama bin Laden in his general war on the US, and 11 per cent - that is, some 220,000 British Muslims - actually approved of the attacks on the twin towers. Moreover, intelligence estimates now suggest that some 50,000 British Muslims have now been drawn into a loose al-Qaeda terrorist support network - an inconceivable nightmare, back when immigration to Britain began. Now, with all this in mind, go on, please: design an immigration policy for us. Not easy, is it?