There's a good reason why Ireland won't ban the wearing of the hijab by Muslim women here, and it's not because we're tolerant.
(What would happen to an Orange or English Tory march down O'Connell Street?) It's because our Muslim population is so small that no one is threatened by it: and it feels too insignificant to proclaim itself a separate community with distinct legal rights of identity, which might then in turn seem to threaten the integrity of the State.
Such a comforting reassurance about the nature of its minority is not shared by the French government, which has outlawed the hijab in French schools. Well, human beings being only human, the one way to ensure that people do something they wouldn't otherwise do is to ban it; and many hitherto secular Muslim females in France might now opt for the hijab, as much through a screw-you obduracy as through obedience to the imam's sartorial diktats.
But it's not hard to see why the French are doing what they're doing: all follies have causes, and the French have finally woken up and realised that they have a vast population which recognises neither France as a legitimate entity nor French civil society as an entity worth defending. Nonetheless, such repression seldom works, as the French will soon discover - indeed, as they did once before with the Catholic Church. Yet what should the French do, as Islamic dissidence spreads, and increasing numbers of French children are raised in a culture of jihad?
In Ireland, meanwhile, we've entered - and of course are winning - our own sanctimonious sweepstake hurdle, where at every fence we gush about the glories of our emerging multicultural society. Which, to judge from experience, will sooner or later mean tolerating anti-Semitism - witness the leader of the Party of French Muslims, Mohamed Latrèche: "The Jews have everything. . .Muslims have nothing". Indeed, even this early on in our brave new multicultural world, comparable lies are masquerading as truths here: at a Muslim demonstration outside the French Embassy in Dublin, protesters' placards declared, "Stop the war on Muslims." Which war is that? The US-led wars which saved the Muslims of Kosovo and Bosnia? The US-led war which expelled the Muslim-killing Taliban from power in Afghanistan? Or the US-led (and French-opposed) war which brought freedom of worship for the Shias of Iraq?
"Multiculturalism" has so become the vogue fatuity of our time that, instead of embracing "tolerance" as the defining cultural ingredient of the new Ireland, we have accepted the gormless mantra that we should be "multicultural". Well, we've seen how that works in Britain. There, a prison officer was dismissed for making a disrespectful aside about Osama bin Laden, a television presenter was sacked for making derogatory remarks about Arab states (go on: name me a single Arab democracy) and a Buckinghamshire library forbade advertisements for a carol service because they were sectarian, just days after its (Muslim) officer for multiculturalism had hosted a party there to celebrate the end of Ramadan.
Multiculturalism is the last political hurrah of a frivolous hippy idiocy, a sort of official free love where we're all going to be respect each other, and agree that all religions are equally meritorious. While we're still smiling dreamily, thinking virtuous, multicultural thoughts and puffing on our shared joint of good intentions, a Charles Manson or an Osama bin Laden starts cutting our throats. Why? Because that's human nature for you: some people are mad, and some prefer that old-time religion, with murderous intolerance at its core.
Of course Patricia McKenna, the high priestess of green, shrieking dottiness, has simple views on the wearing of the hijab, as she has on most things: Islam has a dress code, she declares, so therefore it's just a matter of religious freedom. But of course, nothing to do with religion ever is "just" anything. When you see a woman totally shrouded in an all-encompassing veil, as nowadays you can in Dublin, her eyes invisibly peering from beneath a black beak, we're not talking pure "religion" - we're talking about entirely different civilisations. Answer me this: what happens when girls - inevitably - turn up at Irish schools in that attire?
The Dutch parliament recently completed a report on the lamentable failure of officially endorsed multiculturalism in the Netherlands. That country encouraged immigrants to keep their language, and subsidised some 700 Islamic clubs, even when run by fundamentalists. Did assimilation result? No. Up to 80 per cent of Holland's 850,000 Dutch-born Muslims import their spouses from their ancestral homeland, and an Islamic sub-culture is now entrenched across the country. The Dutch intelligence service, the AIVD, reports a steady penetration of society by Al-Qaeda terrorist networks.
Meanwhile, immigrant communities in the Netherlands top all the undesirable lists, as they do in Britain, Germany and France - proportionately, the most unemployed, the most domestic violence, the most criminality, and so on. All this, now, in a country that did everything possible to welcome its immigrants.
Ireland hasn't even got an immigration policy, other than the platitudes of liberal, middle-class Ireland at its most banal, which largely sees "multiculturalism" as an opportunity to enjoy ethnic restaurants followed by some inter-racial sex, with a cool backing track supplied by Ravi Shankar and the Chieftains. All well and good. But just wait for the other side of multiculturalism, when illiterate gangs from Darndale meet illiterate gangs from Dacca, when Ethiopians in Ennis insist on the Pharaonic circumcision of their daughters, and when a librarian in Rathmines hosts a celebration of Ramadan, meanwhile banning an advert for a Christmas carol service.