John O'Donoghue has "vowed" (according to Monday's Irish Independent) that European police forces will "hunt down" the "vile criminals" responsible for the horrific deaths of the eight refugees found in the container in Wexford last Saturday.
He said he was "deeply moved" by the appalling conditions in the container where the refugees died.
He said "our sympathies go out to the families of these poor people and, of course, our prayers are for the five people who survived".
He directed that every possible resource be made available to Wexford garda∅, Interpol and the police in Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium in their "hunt" for the "criminals" responsible for what happened.
There is a sad irony that the international law governing refugees was first formulated to protect Europeans.
This is the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951.
Indeed it applied initially only to Europeans and the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) concerned itself only with European refugees, mainly fleeing communist regimes in eastern Europe.
The Convention granted certain rights to refugees who were deemed those outside their own country and unable to return as a result of a well-founded fear of persecution on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a social group.
The foundations for Fortress Europe began to be built in the 1980s when European countries first tried to stop would-be refugees from arriving in Europe.
This was in breach of the terms of the UN Convention on Refugees. Then what was known as "diversion policies" were designed, which sought to divert refugees to other countries, mainly in Central Europe.
The UNHCR said this was "clearly contrary to the basic protection principles" of the UN Convention.
Then European governments opted to restrict the application of the Convention to those who feared persecution from states - those who might be persecuted by non-state agencies did not qualify, supposedly. After that, governments opted for "deterrent measures" such as automatic detention of asylum seekers, denial of social assistance and/or the denial of the right to work.
European governments have so far failed to agree on common policies on the treatment of refugees but the standard of the lowest common denominator has come to be applied - the worst practices becoming the norm.
European governments came up with the idea of "safe havens" in Bosnia in 1993 to discourage the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Bosnians in the face of the Serb onslaught. The outcome of that neat idea was the massacre of thousands of Bosnians in Srebrenica and Zepa in 1995 in the "safe havens".
When Austria held the EU presidency in 1998 they came up with a proposal for a "migration strategy", which called for the scrapping of the 1951 UN Convention altogether.
In embarrassment over this proposal, the EU heads of government meeting in Finland in 1999 "reaffirmed their absolute respect of the right to seek asylum" but that is hardly anything more than hot air as their governments collude in further schemes to keep would-be refuges out of Europe.
The Treaty of Amsterdam, which came into force in May 1999, set out an agenda to move asylum matters away from the inter-governmental area to European institutions and the inevitable result of that will be to build even more formidable fortresses against refugees.
The UNHCR estimated two years ago that there were 11.7 million refugees throughout the world and a total of over 22 million people either refugees outside their own countries or internally displaced within their countries, due to persecution. Some of the poorest countries of the world have borne the burden of the refugee problem, countries such as Tanzania, the Congo, Guinea and Pakistan.
In contrast, the European Union countries in total have fewer refugees than Pakistan (Europe had 1,869,780, according to UNHCR at the end of 1999 and of these, half were in Germany, while Pakistan has well over two million). Europe has less than 10 per cent of the total number of people driven from their homes worldwide.
Ireland has played an inglorious part in this shabby history.
We have colluded enthusiastically with the most reactionary European governments in trying to keep the poor and persecuted of the world out of the world's richest area.
In doing so we have encouraged the more desperate of these poor people to take the kind of risks that drove to their awful deaths the poor people for whom John O'Donoghue's sympathies go out, for whom his prayers are offered.
Spare us the tears.
vbrowne@irishtimes.ie