The circumstances and the timing of their deaths inevitably evokes the legend of the Nativity. Perhaps it's as lamentably clichΘd as a Father Trendy parody parable to say so, but officially there was no room for them. So the 13 refugees took their chances of being smuggled into a wealthy inn of the West in a steel container. The party even included three children, and some belonged to the same family. Seeking a world that might give them a better life, they landed instead in a 21st-century hell.
There are always push and pull factors to migration. What precisely pushed these 13 refugees to take their chances in a container carrying office furniture remains unknown. Extortionist traffickers in human cargo probably persuaded them that they would be entombed for only a few hours, whereupon they would awake to freedom and riches in a world of plenty. What pulled them, we can be sure, was the wealth of the West and the fact that the gap between the wealthy and poor parts of the world is expanding.
In that sense, is the flood of migrants worldwide, including the trickle that reaches Ireland, to be condemned for its risk-taking or applauded for its enterprise? After all, we witness politicians and the media lionise local entrepreneurs for their, by comparison, rather Mickey-Mouse "risk-taking". So many contemporary success stories, as clichΘd as any Father Trendy parable, begin with variations of: "Well, I decided it was time to get up off my behind . . . ". Intended to indicate the individuality, initiative and intrinsic no-nonsense of the heroic entrepreneur, they are peddled as morality fables of our age.
Were the Wexford 13 - or, at any rate, the adults among them - not showing enterprise in trying to better their material lives? Surely an argument can be made that, in risking their lives and not just their money, they are extreme entrepreneurs, brave beyond anything our tepid local heroes ever attempt. And surely, too, it was desperation, almost certainly laced with ignorance, which pushed these people. Certainly, states must be tough on the criminal gangs which organise human trafficking, but do states want to be tough on the causes which give rise to such criminal gangs? In a globalising world, even if they want to be tough on such causes, they can't. In practice, globalisation means free movement for capital but not for labour. As a result, it is inevitable that a form of goldrush fever will compel poor people to try to get a share of the world's loot. You can flee political oppression and be a refugee, but if you flee economic oppression you are simply an economic migrant . . . a chancer, really. Yet in a world in which economics has hugely supplanted politics, there's massive hypocrisy in such a view. Apparently, only certain types of people should be praised for getting up off their behinds.
Consider it from the other side. You can stay in your homeland and, if you're lucky, work long hours in a repetitive, dead-end job for a pittance.
Or you can aim to live abroad and work long hours in a repetitive, dead-end job for a living wage, which to you is a fortune. You can consider laying the foundations for better lives for your children. You've seen the opulence of the West on television and in films and magazines. Doubtless, you've heard stories that the streets of Western cities are, at least metaphorically, paved with gold.
We know, or at least can deduce these strains, from our own Irish experience. Indeed, the coffin ships on which many Famine emigrants took their chances, are now being replicated by container ships, unlikely to sink but capable of killing all the same. The question of refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants is not a simple one. Clearly, there are borders to what can be done, and it's not in anybody's interest for the poor world to swamp the wealthy one with migrants.
But the disparities which result from the world economic order guarantee tragedies. Back in the 1950s and 60s, Hollywood movies, in which 16-year-olds owned and drove convertibles - at a time when most Irish adults couldn't even afford a second-hand Morris Minor - made America appear almost other-worldly attractive. Western Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and a few other countries must similarly burn in the imaginations of millions nowadays.
In fact, the disparity between say, Ireland and the US in the 1950s, is minuscule compared with many of the disparities made evident by globalised media today. Yet the arrangement of countries in an economic hierarchy, like the traditional arrangements of economic classes within countries, is certain to lead to competition and struggle. For all the cant about economic liberalism and global markets, the current system promotes a form of globalised feudalism, while pretending to offer individual freedom.
No doubt, one of the great unresolved and unmentioned questions of the European Union is to what extent it might be enlarged to include Muslim countries. Turkey, for instance, from where most of the Wexford 13 came, has thus been left outside the EU. In the Middle East and North Africa, Islamic fundamentalism is, at least in part, a reaction against the perceived racism of the wealthy world. Of course, there are internal factors too - not least the continuing feudalism in so much of the Muslim world - but that is not the full story.
So, confronted by traditional feudalism within and reworked feudalism without, the poor of the world face formidable barriers. What it takes to be driven to risk your life and your family's lives on mountain passes, in leaky boats and in steel containers can only be imagined. It is of a different order from whatever it is that motivates suicide bombers but, clearly, there is sufficient desperation to persuade people that the grave risks involved are justified.
And it's not going to stop. Massive pressures for emigration from countries with very high birthrates and very low wages to rich countries with very low birthrates and very high wages will continue. The difficulty is to manage the transfer of population in a gradual, fair and sustained manner. Then again, we know the dynamic that prevailed when smuggling street drugs became a massive international business. Perhaps the criminals could not have been completely put out of business, but their influence could certainly have been weakened by sensible, instead of hysterical, ignorant and idiotic policies, on drugs.
Now that international trafficking deals in people (as well as drugs and arms), we shouldn't be condemned to replicate the utter failure of the various "wars" on drugs. Perhaps a quota system, fairly administered and sensitive to Irish concerns as well as to those of migrants, is the best option. Lotteries, such as those which largely solved the problem of illegal Irish immigration in the US, might also be considered. But without cross-party agreement on immigration issues, politicians are routinely made beholden, rather than sensitive to, Irish concerns.
Certainly, there is a Thatcherite whiff to the notion that poverty is, almost invariably, the individual's fault. Of course, it can be, but the "I got up off my behind/got on my bike/paddled my own canoe" merchants distort a more complex truth. Ultimately, such distortion leads to the ludicrous, Enid Blyton-like identifying of wealth with goodness and poverty with evil, as in some of the more objectionable analyses made by bewildered US citizens in the wake of September 11th.
Remember that when the US rightly asked itself why any organisation could hate it so much to perpetrate the attacks of September 11th, one routine line of answering held that "the terrorists hate us because of our freedom and because we're winners and because we're good" and so forth. Whatever correlation there is between wealth and morality, it's certainly not as straightforward as that. Yet, such Puritanism and retro-Victorianism, as popularised by Thatcher, remain alarmingly prevalent.
Anyway, as we prepare for yet another Christmas, the deaths in that steel container cannot but remind us about the lack of room at the inn in the 21st century. As United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Mary Robinson has a largely impossible job. Under the circumstances of her having little real clout, she does quite well. It might, however, be wise if the UN insisted that, in future, the person holding that post was still, or had been, a refugee. Then again, UN politics probably has no room for the flagless hordes of migrants that the nations of the world are failing.