We can, I dare say, watch and wait while immigration continues and do nothing to prepare for the consequences, and then repeat the errors of elsewhere. There's a strong argument for that; why go to the enormous trouble of inventing our own mistakes when there are so many perfectly splendid ready-to-wear blunders we can import, especially from Britain? So as people of different races, cultures and languages pour into our inner cities, academics and journalists who live in Sandymount and Ranelagh can give the aboriginal natives of the Liberties and North Strand uplifting lectures on how tolerant they must be of the newcomers and how careful they must be not to offend them. Maybe the odd multicultural festival might come in handy?
Accusations
Meanwhile in those communities, which might be three centuries old, there'll probably be rising indignation and unrest. To a steady mantra of love-thy-neighbours-muzak from the liberal suburbs (unvisited by immigration) local Dublin youths will start clashing with black youths, the Indian shopkeeper who works 22 hours a day will be mugged by junkies, and a girl will be gang-raped. As gardai try to investigate various crimes, there'll be accusations either of police inertia (from white residents) or of police harassment (from blacks). And one day, a garda will be knifed by an immigrant, and then it's, "Hello, can I smell something burning?"
So it's good that the Garda Siochana is at least taking the initiative now, with officers studying the problems of race relations with the specialist unit of the Metropolitan Police in London. But if gardai think that race relations is simply a matter of good policing, they'll probably be in for a sad and turbulent journey up that thoroughly unreliable slope, the learning curve.
Immigration is a certainty. There's as much point in denouncing it and calling for Something To Be Done To Prevent It as there is deploring the Ice Age or the forecasts of Met Eireann. A lot of people are going to have to learn a lot of hard lessons; and the experience of other countries - Britain, France, Austria - suggests either that political establishments are disinclined to learn those lessons, or more seriously, that those lessons cannot be theoretically learned in advance. This might mean that immigration must invariably and inevitably lead to racial conflict, with the standard pattern being the presumption, shared alike by native liberals and by immigrants, that the host community and its police force are somehow or other invariably at fault.
The host working-class community and the host police force will probably not agree, though liberals especially (who normally support the working class) will assure them they are being bad little racists. By that time, of course, segregation will have happened informally but comprehensively and, most of all, bitterly; and within white ghettos a vicious, self-pitying culture will have emerged among young males who feel they are not being understood; and within black ghettos, there will be a vicious, self-pitying culture of victim-hood. Welcome to Tower Hamlets.
Hostile townships
London today, outwardly multiracial, is a patchwork of bitterly hostile townships. A similar future awaits Dublin if we do not plan carefully. Are we capable of facing up to certain predictable but unpalatable features of immigration and discussing them so that at least some sort of groundwork can be prepared? For example, the proportion of men of Afro-Caribbean men imprisoned for sexual crime in Britain is three times that of the Afro-Caribbean population, a ratio which is precisely matched in the US. Institutional racism? Maybe; but other immigrant groups are under-represented in both prison systems.
The issue is not just one of crime and who is responsible for it; it can also be one of economic success. Fifty three of the richest 1,000 people in Britain and Ireland, according to the recent Sunday Times survey, are of Indian /Pakistani origin, and all through recent business enterprise. Only one such millionaire entrepreneur is of Afro-Caribbean origin. (There were four Murphys.)
In other words, there are not just "immigrants". There are peoples with different cultures and different personal and economic habits. The simple, and not infrequently expressed view in Ireland, especially after the murder of Stephen Lawrence, that Britain is a racist country hardly squares with the fact that in a single generation, 5 per cent of its richest people are of Indian origin. Presumably, a similar pattern will emerge here over the next score years.
Racial slur
Before immigrants of Afro-Caribbean origin arrive in numbers we should be asking why it is people of that background are such under-achievers? The question must be posed publicly so that it can be addressed publicly, and with no racial slur involved. There might not be answers to such questions, but we mustn't allow public discussion be limited by the politically correct censors of British polytechnic sociology, who have intellectually dominated (and limited) the debate there.
Such counter-productive idiots were responsible for devising racism-awareness courses for teachers in England - so that white teachers might detect racism amongst themselves, and that blacks might detect racism among their white colleagues. In other words, racism is a whites-only disease, a proposition I should love to hear being discussed calmly and rationally in a village-clearing in Rwanda.