The year in Ireland is not 2005. It is about 1965 in terms of the French and British experience of immigration. Forty years on, let's see how things are going in both places. July, and suicide mass murderers in London. More recently, in Birmingham, riots between Asians and Afro-Caribbeans, which were not designated "racial" by the police because no whites were involved, writes Kevin Myers
This is no doubt good news to the family of the black IT specialist Isaiah Sam-Young, who was knifed to death by Asians. So maybe they killed him because they didn't like his shirt or his taste in music. Whatever it was, it apparently wasn't his race. What a relief.
The French tend to wait for a longer time before they act, and then they explode, their revolution being their enduring template. Which does at least show that, in one regard anyway, the descendents of immigrants in France behave just like the aboriginal natives. So in what has been a virtual racial insurrection, hundreds of towns and cities have been hit by riots, with tens of thousands of cars destroyed, leaving big smiles only on the faces of Messrs Citroen and Renault.
The French way of dealing with immigrants was to deny there could be any difference in attitude or culture between the children of in-comers and those of the native French. The glories of French culture would embrace all with liberté, égalité et fraternité, but of course, like all ideological claptrap, such simple solutions didn't work. However, the belief that La France in all its gloire, unlike perfidious Albion, was capable of seamless integration of immigrants prevented the French chattering classes from chattering about what desperately needed to be chattered about.
Meanwhile, across La Manche, perfidious Albion similarly refused to discuss immigration - not out of hubris, like the French, but a desire not to appear beastly, all because of a single disastrous speech by Enoch Powell.
Which doesn't say much for the intellectual courage or imagination of the thinking classes in Britain. Thus Britain stayed silent as the immigrants poured in: and now, immigrant communities are many millions strong.
With France's deep traditions of anti-Catholicism, the state's political culture separating church and state was invoked to outlaw ostentatious displays of Islamic difference in schools. I suspect this is one key, if largely unspoken, reason why Renault and Citroen will soon be working double-shifts, and why French insurance companies are even now scanning their small print, searching for exemptions from pay-outs which involve religious riots. Insurance companies always scan the bottom line, after all, and they spell Mahomet's title one way only: profit.
The British, on the other hand, decided to embrace "diversity" by abolishing anything which appeared to be too non-immigrant. Guided walks of the Lake District were hastily scrapped when it turned out that the participants were all white, and perhaps even worse, middle class. The Christmas holiday in Birmingham was renamed the "Winterval", so as not to offend immigrants, it apparently being assumed that native Christians had no feelings to be offended. Derby city council earlier this year decided not to re-erect the once much-loved statue of a boar damaged by a German bomb in 1941, lest it offend the rather more recently arrived Muslims. One workplace elsewhere in England outlawed public displays of pictures of pigs, even cartoon pigs, for the same reason.
This nonsense came to a splendid high point a couple of years ago in High Wycombe, where the librarian refused to allow a Christmas play be performed by the local school in the town library because it would be offensive to the multicultural nature of the building. Only later did it transpire that the librarian had not long before allowed a Hindu festival to be celebrated there.
The latest British chapter in multiculturalism was the decision of Suffolk county council to drop a subsidy for local Christmas lights on the grounds that it would not match "its core values of equality and diversity." Which merely shows that these words are meaningless mumbo-jumbo - for what diversity or equality are possible if you have already abandoned local ways for others to be diverse from and equal to? George Bernard Shaw was once propositioned by a beautiful woman who said: "Imagine our child, with your brains and my looks." He replied: "But madam: what if it has your brains and my looks?" And multiculturalism can work just like that. Mixing British with Bangladeshi doesn't necessarily mean you get an Islamic Tom Stoppard, but a skinhead thug called Ahmed.
Irish crossed with Moroccan might give you Riverbellydance: or equally, it can produce Seán, the suicide bomber.
We have piously modelled our response to immigration on British lines, loudly proclaiming the virtues of anti-racist programmes, as if society can actually be constructed around either virtue or programmes (as in, say, our amazingly successful anti-drugs programmes, ho ho ho). Moreover, we share a fatal reluctance to be realistic with more than the failed models of France and Britain. For the European Union itself is a very masterpiece of denial, with its urbane and witless embrace of unprincipled secularism.
Thus the one common feature of Europe, out of which all European cultures grew - Christianity - was excluded from the now-dead, though enduringly preposterous constitution: space-travel, however, was included.
Such drooling, deracinated idiocy does not befit a continental power, which is what the Brussels Eurocracy still dreams of creating. But a continental power is something Europe will never be - unless, in about a century's time, it becomes an Islamic one: as well it might.