Kevin Myers: Marvellous, utterly marvellous, to see the present immigration debate - if you can dignify such a festival of mealy-mouthed evasions and vapid pieties with such a term - following the predictable lines of other European societies which experienced immigration a generation ago.
Once again, the reactionary, learn-nothing left has brandished the r-word at people who urge restrictions on immigration into Ireland; for within liberal culture, calling any opponents "racists" instantly wins every argument, regardless of what they are really saying.
We are the first generation to have some sort of semblance of control over the real future of Ireland. Other generations hoped to have that power, but congenital economic failure meant that no government was ever able to decide how things would be in a week's time, never mind 30 years. Governance was invariably about all-hands-to-the-pumps crisis management, and the only long-term project which endured through the history of the State was the Irish language - in which, by the way, "dodo" is dódó.
Now, finally, life has been good to us. So what kind of Ireland do we want in 50 years? Go back half-a-century and ask the people in Britain what they envisaged for their country. Who in 1954 would have thought that by 2004 places such as Burnley, Bradford, Preston, Huddersfield, would be nearly 50 per cent Muslim, as they now are? No one; indeed, even to have suggested such a possibility then, or over the next 20 years, would have invited the wrath of the ideologically pro-immigration left, with righteous denunciations of scaremongering racism.
Comparable demographics apply across much of mainland Europe, where there has been a rise of virulent anti-Semitism, largely centred within immigrant Muslim communities (which the EU tried to conceal by burying its own revealing report on the subject). Nor is the issue solely one of importing the virus of anti-Semitism through the millions of Islamic immigrants. Muslim communities in Britain have so far produced three suicide bombers and 1,200 volunteers for Taliban/Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. Moreover, in an opinion poll last year, 13 per cent of British Muslims said they supported the 9/11 attacks on the US.
Now, this is not (a) funny, or (b) talked about - barely at all in Britain, and absolutely not in Ireland, where we are told to be bewitched by the imminent multicultural splendours ahead. So we don't discuss the complexities and the consequences of immigration, but instead waffle on (in Irish Times-reading circles especially) about the glorious benefits of immigration.
It is true that immigration has brought us huge benefits, but usually at the expense of the Third World. We have stolen doctors from the bedsides of Malawi peasants, and without them our health service would be on a par with, well, Malawi's. African traders have turned Dublin's Moore Street, for so long the fruit-and-veg slum of Europe, into a vibrant and colourful market; and of course, for decades, our restaurant industry - at almost every level - has depended on foreigners.
So, more immigrants, more diversity, will make Ireland a more interesting place. Good. We agree on that. But steady there. Who actually wants Athlone or Portlaoise, 50 years hence, to be what Preston, Bradford, Huddersfield are now? What happens if the children of immigrants insist on retaining the cultural norms of their parents' homeland? Where stands multiculturalism when an immigrant culture demands the right to slice off teenage girls' vulvas? Or insists on arranged marriages in childhood? Or the honour-killing of daughters who do not do their fathers' bidding? Racism! This will never happen here! Will it not?
Well, liberals in Britain insisted it wouldn't happen there; but it has, by God, a lot, and will continue to do so. Furthermore, through arranged marriages, Muslim immigration to Britain is now almost unstoppable, with spouse-acquisition in the ancestral homelands being a means of informal but highly efficient population transfer. You doubt me? Go to Yorkshire and report otherwise.
A fever of political correctness has seized much of our media, effectively distorting the truth about foreign women's headlong rush to Ireland to produce an Irish baby. How else could the truth that a majority of pregnant mothers arriving late and unbooked at the Coombe were foreign be presented in an inverse manner in this newspaper, almost as if some urban myth were being refuted? "Almost half" of such mothers, we proclaimed, were Irish. How else could the Rotunda's revelation that virtually none of such late-presenting mothers were Irish, lie concealed, unheadlined, at the very bottom of the same story?
Weakness, inertia, liberal smugness and abject political cowardice allowed an army of self-styled "asylum-seekers" to drive a coach and four through the dismal charade of our immigration controls. As it happens, most of those who bluffed their way in genuinely seem to want to work - so good luck to them; but such easy-going days must, emphatically, now be over.
For what about the Ireland we bequeath to the unborn? Have we the courage now to discuss the Islamic component in Ireland 2054? No doubt, most Muslims will be what most Muslims are today - hard-working and law-abiding, and will be a cultural and intellectual asset. But what of those jihadistas who in life and limb are loyal to holy war, and who seem to be present on the wilder shores of almost all Islamic societies, yearning for the martyrs' paradise beyond? What value our liberal immigration policies today if the price for our grandchildren tomorrow is such fine fellows, Irishmen with Irish accents, preaching the virtues of the suicide bomber against the infidel, in a mosque which was once a Catholic church?