I suspect there was a sub-text to the recent Siptu-organised march against Irish Ferries. This was a real and widespread fear of uncontrolled immigration and its long-term consequences. That fear is justified. Those who do not share it are either fools or those tiresome, doctrinaire multicultural ideologues for whom no amount of evidence will change anything, writes Kevin Myers.
The paradox is that outsourcing, as Irish Ferries are attempting to do with their workforce, is precisely the way to share our good fortunes with our eastern colleagues of the EU, without population movements impoverishing them or causing overcrowding in our labour market. We give them jobs, at pay rates which would be impossible to live on in Ireland, and thus everyone gains: the existing Irish workers walk out with big fat redundancy cheques; Irish exporters are able to transfer their goods into foreign markets at lower cost; and the home countries and the families of the new workforce keep both them, their incomes and their taxes.
Siptu, of course, is primarily worried about losing members, which is the real reason for its neo-Scargillite militancy. Most trade unions nowadays are little more than pyramid-selling workforce-franchises leeching off the public service, of which Irish Ferries was once part.
The productive economy, which the public service leeches off in turn, is almost entirely non-unionised: this is the very sector which has transformed Ireland, and is inhaling thousands of immigrants from the far side of Europe.
Most of these immigrants are strikingly superior to the native product.
They give a new meaning to e-quality. They are extremely intelligent, exceedingly pleasant, exceptionally hard-working, and - a real surprise - extraordinarily good-looking. So what do I smell here? I smell trouble.
Casual jobs are vanishing from the Irish labour market. Next summer Irish students who want to work to pay for the forthcoming year at college will almost certainly find that there are no vacancies anywhere. The jobs they would once have done are now taken by immigrants, who anyway are probably more talented and more industrious. These young outsiders have filled all the available crevices in our labour market. It is not just a Dublin matter: virtually every village in Ireland has its platoon of Estonians, Latvians, Poles and Czechs.
The gravitational pull between the armies of unemployed bright young people in eastern Europe and the beckoning Irish labour market means exactly the same as water on a sloping floor: movement. It is a scientific certainty that both water and labour, will find their own level - unless, that is, you put a barrier to the migration of either commodity.
With a labour pool of millions on one side of Europe, and an open labour market on the other, the outcome is certain: one will fill the other till it overflows.
But by that time, other forces will have been unleashed, the most obvious being native resentment at economic opportunities being filled by foreigners.
Most people know this, though, of course, this has not been reflected in the media. With simpering piety, virtually all public debate about immigration has been confined to a few ideological liberals, for whom Dogmatic Europhile Multiculturalism is a sine qua non. There are two things to be said about DEM. The first is that it sounds fine, and the second is that it doesn't work.
We are probably less than a year away from serious social conflict between illiterate Irish youngsters (as 25 per cent of our school-leavers are) who can't get jobs, and the Polish nuclear scientists, prima ballerinas and brain surgeons who are cleaning lavatories. I hope I'm wrong, but that's the feeling I get. This is before we even take account of the thousands of Muslims who have come here.
As if we needed even further evidence of this, the recent race riots in Sydney clearly have a number of causes, but one of them is that some Arab-Australians have been gathering at Cronulla Beach to abuse and threaten girls wearing bikinis. The idea that some members of any immigrant communities would wish to make sheilas sunbathe in burkas is as laughable as immigrants here trying to stop Irish people drinking - but do you know, that day might not be far off either.
Anyone with two brain-cells to rub together knows we have to limit (but not halt) immigration - if necessary at the price of reducing growth, for as things are going, we will soon not have an Irish society but merely a racially and culturally cantonised economy with no binding values, and no common history or culture or shared sense of identity.
And people know this, but they are afraid to discuss it: which in part explains why all previous attempts in this column to get a serious letters-debate going have failed dismally.
However, it's easier to walk than to write: hence, I suspect, the recent massive march in Dublin.
To be sure Siptu's misrepresentation of the issues at Irish Ferries has caused many people much genuine if misplaced anger. But 100,000 people don't march simply on an issue concerning a few hundred jobs.
No, such numbers represent a real concern that Irish life is changing faster and more irrevocably than we can cope with. The real issue isn't Irish Ferries.
It's mass immigration, which is no longer sustainable at present levels.
End of story.