Refugees are reminding us too eerily of ourselves

There was a time, less than three years ago, when the most fashionable thing to be in Dublin was Romanian. The city's elite was awestruck by an event so exciting that people who would normally be mortified if their friends suspected that they even knew where Tallaght was made the trek out to the National Basketball Arena to pay homage.

Silviu Purcarete's breathtaking production of Aeschylus's The Danae was the sensation of the 1996 Dublin Theatre Festival. It was one of the most spectacular shows ever seen in Ireland - a cast of 110 actors playing over a stage area of 8,000 square feet, with lighting, movement, design and music firing on all cylinders.

Coming away from it, we wondered ruefully why we Irish couldn't be as cultivated as the Romanians. How come they were so elegant, so imaginative, so goddamned European, while we were still the hicks on the outskirts? Yet how poignant it is to think of that great piece of theatre now. For as well as being a brilliant production, it was also a profoundly political one. The Danae is a myth about the origins of Europe, and a stark challenge to any exclusive notion of European culture. It tells the story of the flight from Egypt to ancient Greece of the 50 daughters of Danaos and their pursuit by their male cousins, the 50 sons of Egyptos, who are intent on forcing them into marriage.

This story, with its images of war, rape and murder, of conflict between what are now Christian Europe and its Muslim neighbours, was redolent of the dark viciousness of Bosnia. It was a powerful rebuke to the cosy illusion that Europe is a serene entity, neatly bounded by a shared heritage of Christianity and classical civilisation.

And, of course, at its heart was a group of refugees. For anyone who saw the show, the abiding image is that of a phalanx of women with dowdy suitcases, scuttling from place to place, searching for a home.

At the time, these images, for an Irish audience, were risk-free. We could appreciate what they were telling us about the instability of the Europe to which we belong.

Because, of course, we had no stake in all of this. There was no cost and no consequence. It was about somewhere else. And, back then, Romanians were brilliant people who came, put on spectacular shows and left. It would be fascinating to bring The Danae back to Dublin now. It would provoke some interesting questions. How open are we to the real Europe, now that it is dawning on us that being European is a matter of responsibilities as well as of entitlements? How much, beyond the cliches of xenophobic editorials, do we know about Romanian culture? What, after all, does all our boasted sophistication and cosmopolitanism amount to?

The short period since the 1996 Dublin Theatre Festival has encompassed an astonishing transformation. Think, for example, of the headline on the front page of last Tuesday's Evening Herald: "Crackdown on Illegal Refugees". Ten years ago, what image would these words have conjured up for a passerby who saw them on a news-stand?

Irish youngfellas in jumpers and jeans being hustled away from building sites in the Bronx by beefy officers of the Immigration and Naturalisation Service. Irish nannies giving false names in Boston.

We would have read the words of the headline in a martyred, outraged tone. "Crackdown" would carry undertones of bullying, of terror, of big, faceless forces trapping small, harmless people. "Illegal" would be a mere detail, an irritation invented by perverse bureaucrats for the sole purpose of thwarting the natural rights of Irish people to go in search of a better life.

Now, "Crackdown" is a term of triumph, heralding the long overdue arrival of just retribution. "Illegal" is an abyss on one side of which stand the good, decent people and on the other the shifty people who have forfeited their right to human sympathy.

"Refugees" means them, not us. They are not like the boy in the Bronx or the girl in Boston. We don't see the world through their eyes. They are mysterious, swarthy figures, blinking at us from the interior of a cargo container or lurking furtively in the back of a long-distance lorry.

I can't help thinking these days of W.B. Yeats's repellent poem The Great Day: "Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!/ A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot./ Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!/ The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on."

This is Ireland's great day, and we are, for the moment at least, the beggars on horseback. We've moved quite suddenly from the sullen, unsettled edge of Europe to a place near the centre. Yesterday, we were beggars, watching out for every stray euro, panhandling for headage payments, cadging money for sewers and interpretive centres.

Today, we've got cafes that sell 50 kinds of coffee, pubs that sell 15 kinds of porter. Million-pound houses don't amaze us any more.

But the lash goes on. From up on our high horses, we can see the greedy, grasping hands reaching for our new-found privilege. And though we don't like to say so, the sight, as well as being scary, is just a little thrilling.

There's something rather flattering, after all, about kids huddling in dark containers, living on cat food, risking life and limb, just to get to where we are now. It's not the kind of flattery that softens the heart, but the kind that makes the recipient haughty and smug.

It's still a kind of beggary, though. A nation stands on its own feet when it has some clear sense of where it has come from and where it's going, when it's not afraid of its own reality.

What we have at the moment is, on the contrary, a hysterical denial of Irish experience and a fantastic illusion that the current boom represents some kind of eternal normality, as if we had all grown up knowing how much Javanese to mix with the Kenyan for a perfect cup of coffee.

When you hear Irish people talking about how Romanians aren't real asylum-seekers, merely economic migrants, this latter term is generally spoken with an air of contempt. Never mind that economic migration has been endemic in Ireland for the last 150 years, so that it has become the single most important aspect of who we are. Never mind that the current rate of people seeking asylum in Ireland - 5,000 a year at most - is just a tenth of the annual outflow of economic emigrants from Ireland in the late 1980s.

Could it be that the hysteria about Romanian migrants comes, not from a sense of their exotic strangeness but from a recognition of their terrible familiarity? Who are those people peering out of the containers but slightly sallower Irish, turbulent people from the margins of Europe, stripped of our charm, our romance and our talent for evoking sympathy?

The only difference is that our timing was better. Well schooled by decades of practice, we were able to smuggle our way into fortress Europe without having to bribe shady operators or endure the journey in the dark, eating cold pet food.

Fintan O'Toole is temporarily based in New York