When urban myths replace facts, and when self-appointed crackpot organisations such as the Immigration Control Platform are taken seriously, it's time to wonder what the media are up to.
For all the prattle in Cork and central Dublin about "floods of freeloaders", we are not drowning beneath an incoming tide of immigrants.
We have more than we're used to, but go to any major city in Europe, even Prague or Oslo, and you'll see far more black, brown and yellow faces than you'll see in Dublin, never mind in Galway, Cork, Dundalk or Donegal.
Moreover, many of the dark faces here do not belong to "immigrants".
A lot of them will be of English people, some of whose distant ancestors might have come from Africa; but that is neither here nor there.
They are here, which is their every right; and if England could take millions of Irish people down the years, it's hardly an imposition if a few English people come here.
Economic opportunity
And it is a few. And a few French people, and a few Italian, and a few. . .and oh, Christ, who gives a damn? For only fools and no-hopers and bigots worry about the colour of Europeans who move here for economic opportunity; their protests are irrelevant and futile, the plaintive shriek of a madman howling at the moon to go away. Black Europeans will not go away. They are here to stay for ever.
That is their certain future as well as ours, and their right to come to Dublin is every bit equal to that of a Roscommon person with the same destination in mind, and vice versa.
The problem - and when taxi-driver Weltbilt begins to be taken seriously then you have a problem - arises in part from the systematic misuse of language within the media to describe the demographic changes in Irish life. Illegal immigrants, asylum-seekers, black immigrants from the EU, legal immigrants: almost all come under the generic title "asylum-seekers".
Yet most of those who claim to be asylum-seekers do not come from the country where their alleged oppression occurred, but from France and from the UK, where it did not.
We have no obligation to accept these people. None whatever. The port they left was not in a dictatorial land where their safety was unsure, but in fellow-EU countries, where their liberties were as guaranteed as they are here. They are simply illegal immigrants.
We have the right to let them stay or make them leave; but they absolutely do not have the legal power to pick and choose between European countries, claiming a right to stay in whichever one of them suits their particular needs best.
Welcome immigration
Far from being opposed to immigration, I welcome it. Normans brought their law, the English their parliament, the Huguenots their linen, the Scots their business acumen, the Germans their industrial method, the Americans their silicate vision, the Chinese, French, and Bangladeshis their cuisine. Fresh forms of Irishness are being forged now as people of different cultures from Africa and Asia come here, and settle, and marry and bring their diet, their music, their wisdom with them: and, of course, their problems.
Facing up to problems is what being an adult is all about; and adulthood is not a commonplace quality in public discourse in Ireland.
One reason we failed to deal with the issue of Travellers is a terror of speaking about the problem honestly; instead, we have resorted publicly to weasel words and sanctimonious cant, rather than tackling the problems with those adults qualities of courage, determination and thought.
So is it surprising that with the arrival of a few thousand outsiders, so many of us are up on the kitchen chair and screaming, like a maid who has seen a mouse?
Yet any way you look at the "problem", it is solvable; even if you were to give every single illegal immigrant masquerading as an asylum-seeker the right to stay, the numbers are tiny - a few score thousand in a population of nearly four million, in the least densely populated country in Europe.
So the problem isn't complex.
But when the media fail to tell the palpable truth, the saloon bar fantasists and the banshees and the firbolgs of the Immigration Control Platform rush in to fill the void. And we have failed to tell the truth. Our liberal inclination is to present each story about every illegal immigrant as if their case is not merely legitimate but morally compelling.
Agreeable fictions
If you treat readers like that, you will not merely lose them; you will lose your own moral authority. Assenting to agreeable fictions in order to appeal to some unspoken liberal agenda merely undermines your own credibility, leaving the way clear for fantasists, hate-mongers and ranting fascists.
So those who love truth should delight that Áine Ní Chonaill of the Immigration Control Platform failed to condemn the recent racist murder in Dublin of the Chinese student Zhao Liu Tao.
Her silence should clarify how the rest of us must now feel about an "organisation" such as hers: with quiet, studied loathing.
Nor is it just a matter of fringe cranks like her. We have a potentially deeply fascist society in Ireland. Sinn Féin represents a violent tribal movement whose followers privately do not speak with the public tongues of their leaders, who are obliged to speak in the borrowed honey of reason. The rank and file think differently. A prediction: where Sinn Féin polls well today is where racism will be worst tomorrow.