There was an electrifying moment in Flight to Grosse Ile, this year's production by the Mountjoy Theatre Project, which opened with a gala performance on Monday night. Father Caseau, a French-Canadian priest, is preaching on a text from the Gospel of St Mark: "Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for such is the Kingdom of Heaven."
Beside him on the altar, dressed in rags, are a boy and a girl - Patrick and Brigid. Their parents have died on one of the Famine ships moored in the St Lawrence river at Grosse Ile. Father Caseau is urging his congregation to take in these and other Irish children. "Does Patrick not come to you in need, like Jesus?"
We know that hundreds of Irish orphans were adopted by families in the province of Quebec during the Famine. The children kept their Irish names. All along the Gaspe peninsula, in little towns with names like Trois Rivieres and St Antoine, there are today French-Canadian families called Farrelly, Kenny, O'Hagan and so on. Most of these adoptions were organised by the Catholic Church, led by the Vicar-General of the Archdiocese of Quebec. Father Frederic Caseau was the son of a distinguished French-Canadian family who became known as "the priest of the Irish".
In a bold theatrical stroke, Lulu Reynolds, who directed Flight to Grosse Ile, has cast a black prisoner in Mountjoy, Tola Mohmoh, to play Father Caseau. He stands at the front of the stage, wholly absorbed in his sermon, pleading with his flock to extend the hand of Christian charity to these unfortunate children who have lost everything in the flight from famine and persecution.
On Monday night the actor seemed to be talking quite directly to his audience, which included the Minister for Justice, John O'Donoghue, the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Desmond Connell, TDs and senators, media celebrities.
Given the times that are in it, the scenes that have filled our television screens from Kosovo, it was perhaps not surprising that his words were listened to in intent silence.
Flight to Grosse Ile, which recalls the sufferings of thousands of Irish refugees through the story of one Tipperary family, is a timely and challenging play. There are other reasons for this, apart from the subject matter. The evident pride of the cast in the production and their excitement in discovering, as individuals, talents they perhaps did not know they possessed are very moving.
For this, Lulu Reynolds and all those involved in the production must take much of the credit. Overall, there shines the commitment of the governor, John Lonergan, to his charges, and his determination to make those of us on the outside of what he calls "the prison community" rethink our comfortable prejudices.
This year, the urgent relevance of the play itself makes any rough edges in the production seem unimportant. The actors on the stage are our people and this is what they went through. Now their experience is being repeated daily in the Balkans, just two hours away.
The Irish public has given with great generosity to appeals for aid for the Kosovan refugees, but there is also a growing sense that this crisis cries out for a more imaginative official response than we have given as a State in the past. We can no longer shelter behind the excuse that Ireland is a poor State to excuse the paucity of our official charity.
The Celtic Tiger bounds from strength to strength, yet these images from the tented cities in Macedonia and Albania speak very directly to our own historic experiences in places like Grosse Ile. There, too, the scenes of refugees - starving, fever-ridden - provoked reactions of fear.
The Montreal Gazette asked what would happen if Canada were to be "inundated with an enormous crowd of poor and destitute Irish emigrants" and demanded that "strong legislative measures" be introduced to curb them, but there were acts of impressive moral leadership.
John Mills, the popular mayor of Montreal, was a regular visitor to the fever sheds where the Irish were housed and died from an illness contracted there. The Catholic Bishop of Montreal met a similar fate after visiting Grosse Ile.
Anglican clergy and Catholic priests ministered together to the sick and starving. The doctors who died are remembered on a simple stone monument on the island, as are 5,294 people who, "flying from pestilence and famine in Ireland in the year 1847, found in America but a grave.".
We are at a turning point in our attitude to refugees who come to this State seeking a better life. We are moving towards being a multi-ethnic society and have the choice whether to regard this prospect with fear or satisfaction.
To date, the quality of leadership which we have been given by our politicians, with a few notable exceptions, has been both minimalist and lacking in any generosity of imagination.
Even the simple, practical suggestion that asylum-seekers should be allowed to work while their applications are being processed has now been put on hold. This is a proposal which has the support of the trades unions and organisations representing the unemployed.
It would help a high number of refugees to integrate with Irish society and discourage the perception, where it exists, that they are sponging on the taxpayer, yet the Department of Justice is said to fear that even this relaxation of the existing rules would act as an extra "pull factor" to potential asylum-seekers.
It may be that the reports of human misery and the images on television from Albania and Macedonia will help us to examine our own prejudices and fears, to look in a more kindly way on those who arrive in our State seeking a new home. The experience of others who have come in the wake of similar conflicts - a couple of hundred from Vietnam, under a thousand from Bosnia - makes for shaming reading.
Although most of these people seem almost painfully grateful to have been allowed into Ireland, life has been far from easy for them. The majority have had difficulties in learning English and in getting jobs. Increasingly, many of them have been subjected to physical or verbal abuse. If there is a gleam of hope, it is that their children seem to have fared better, being successful at school and in adjusting to Irish life. Like the orphans in Quebec, they have been given a chance.
We have been there ourselves and are now being asked to recognise a debt to our own history. That is why Flight to Grosse Ile is the most important play, politically, which Dublin has seen in a long time. It runs at Mountjoy for the rest of the week and there are a limited number of tickets still available.
Eithne Mulhern in John Lonergan's office is the person to call.