No doubt few of you noticed the Court of Appeal's ruling in London last week over what a Muslim girl is allowed to wear in school, and no doubt most of that few - here in spanking, brand-new, liberal, multicultural, 21-kinds-of-marriage Ireland - thought the ruling good.
The court decided that 16-year-old Shabina Begum should be allowed to wear the all-enveloping jilbab to school, instead of the shalwar kameez, loose trousers and tunic, with headscarf, as preferred by the school's Muslim headmistress.
Thus in its mushy, meandering way, the appeal court has cleared the way for a potentially disastrous social divisiveness. For the jilbab is a statement of moral superiority over others, especially over other Muslim girls; and what teenage girls will not take the public and sartorial option of appearing purer than their peers?
Perhaps even more importantly, by her own account, the girl's decision to take a court case against her school was not just driven by her religious beliefs, but by how she felt Islam stood in the post-9/11 world. Thus, the hand of Osama bin Laden has reached into every school in England, to change the way Muslim girls are dressing.
This would be largely irrelevant in Ireland if we had shown any real awareness of the enormously complex problems which lie ahead of us as our cities are being transformed by immigration. These changes are geometric and irreversible, and we have precedents galore from Holland, France and Britain about the trajectory ahead of us. But, with a studied and sanctimonious pride, we shall probably choose to ignore those lessons and instead preach about the glories of living in a multicultural society, as if that term was synonymous with tolerance.
It is not. The Nazis had a culture. So did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. No society can remain intact if it allows fundamentalists to assert their will in a local school or neighbourhood, if Nazis demanded - and were granted - the right to have anti-Semitic tuition, or communists won the right to discuss the liquidation of class enemies in biology lessons. Tolerance has to be intolerant of mutant, toxic forms of belief, going by the name "fundamentalism".
Communism was fundamentalist socialism. Nazism was fundamentalist nationalism. Between them they caused the deaths of some 100 million people in the 20th century. Moreover, here in Ireland we are no strangers to fundamentalism: witness Irish Provisionalism. So this phenomenon is not an Islamic deviance, but a human one. And all such fundamentalists, if intelligent, advance both by violence and by stealth. The Nazi trooper was accompanied about his task by a smooth-talking politician or a plausible counsel. (Lawyers were the most numerous professional group within the upper echelons of the Nazi party.)
In Ireland we have been so busy preening ourselves both over our ridiculous and unprincipled neutrality and the mass opposition to the war for democracy in Iraq that we have almost ceased to attend both to the threats to which we are host, and the trends to which we are vulnerable.
The Islamic fundamentalist group the European Council for Fatwa and Research has its headquarters in Clonskeagh, in Dublin. Its founder, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, advocates suicide bombing of Israelis by children, though whether it is sinful for girl suicide bombers not to be wearing the marquee-like jilbab when they blow their infidel enemy apart is a little unclear. On the one hand, they're unlikely to get into a synagogue wearing one; on the other, if they revealed the outline of a leg or two about their holy mission, they might briefly arouse lustful thoughts among the Jewish males they were about to slaughter. What an appalling choice! Who would be a young suicide she-bomber these days?
The sheikh should be barred from Ireland, as he is from the US. But maybe we are too scared to do that; maybe Ireland's links with fundamentalists confer protection. For why would Islamic extremists want to bomb such a useful operational base as this one, when it contains so many innocent Muslims among whom they can conceal themselves, where there is just one garda officer who is even moderately proficient in Arabic, where there is so much bien-pensant denial about the perils of fundamentalism, and where movement between here and target-countries such as Britain is so easy?
Moreover, the presence of such fundamentalists means that the jilbab debate will come to Ireland as inevitably as has all the earlier mumbo-jumbo of multiculturalism.
Personally, I detest the jilbab: as a statement about relations between men and women, it is misogynistic and dehumanising. It sexually fetishises every part of a woman's body, and then makes a total taboo of that sexualisation. Every time I see a woman so attired, I see a sartorial rebuttal of all that is decent, tolerant and liberating about Western civilisation: the jilbab is a declaration of total sexual apartheid, and a step towards Pharaonic circumcision.
Now, will we enact laws to protect the right of schools to create their own binding rules about uniforms? Otherwise, the issue will be decided by our ruling caste of lawyers, such as those cretins in the English Court of Appeal, and probably in much the same deplorable way. For it was not English law that the Court of Appeal in London invoked, but European "human rights conventions".
And who will be the first real victims of such sanctimonious imbecility here? The teenage daughters of moderate Muslim immigrants whose only wish is to integrate themselves and their families in the land that is now theirs.