The oddest things make you notice prejudice. A Belgian farmer called Michel was working his backwoods plot close to the French border when he noticed a blue police van wheeze to a halt nearby. Four adults and three children crawled out, looking dishevelled and confused. The van sped away.
Minutes later Michel was tending them in his kitchen. They hadn't eaten for hours and were exhausted. His guests couldn't speak any of the languages he used, so he reckoned he must be getting it wrong about what had happened to them. But he wasn't. They were part of a group of 45 Kosovan Albanian and Kurdish asylum-seekers who had been abandoned on various Belgian back roads by no less an agency than the French border police.
France, like other leading European countries, loudly proclaims a range of anti-racist strategies. The volume of recent Government announcements about combating racism might lead you to think Ireland is starting to follow the same line. In this week alone, Mr O'Donoghue announced a package of anti-racism measures, while finally getting the Equal Status Act up and running.
Progress? Only in part.
Prejudice of whatever orientation always seems to belong to someone else. Education at various levels from the family on can minimise the likelihood of converting prejudiced thinking into prejudiced action. Legislation and good public practice aspire to make such behaviour unacceptable over time.
It is naive, however, to ignore the possibility that Government agencies themselves may reflect the same negative attitudes they claim to condemn in the general population. But this trend persists in official speeches and comment.
Government agencies are not exempted under the Equal Status Act. Yet even allowing for the historical initiative implied by the new Act, there is a disturbing lack of evidence to suggest that rights affirmed there will also be affirmed in official practice. Unless that happens, the Equality Authority will be working with one official hand tied behind its back. And as the other hand is the one that feeds it, the authority is not always in a position to bite back.
To believe the Government's anti-racism strategies will work, you need to measure the effectiveness with which they have addressed other issues of prejudice and discrimination.
Take gender equality, a relatively simple target. In 1997 the Government promised a minimum 40 per cent balance in the numbers of men and women appointed to State boards. But in 2000 the Government is still expecting men to do too much, and women too little. This, despite evidence that indicates men's greater physical vulnerability to stress.
One of the starkest examples of the strategy's failure is within the Department of Justice itself, which has overall responsibility for equality programmes. The Department expects men to bear 74.25 per cent of the load on State boards in its remit, while excusing women their responsibility, except in 25.75 per cent of places. This reflects the Department's internal staffing position where men again must carry an unfair burden of decision-making within it.
Measuring the effectiveness of anti-racist strategies is also the Department of Justice's responsibility. Yet the task of evaluation and its methods, details of which are unspecified so far, will be the responsibility of the same unit which has been unable for whatever reasons to reach much simpler targets on gender balance.
In the hypothetical situation where the Department's equality unit decides to examine the fairness of asylum procedures, or determine any latent prejudice within them, it is difficult to see how the unit can avoid engaging in a direct conflict of interest with itself.
In other words, there are neither reliable targets nor reliable systems to make sure that the £4.5 million to be spent combating racism over the next three years is spent well.
France spent billions of francs on antiracist programmes targeting children and the overall public. Its immigration officials and border police, however, were not specifically included in the process. Yet among them was the minority who unceremoniously dumped unwanted asylum-seekers into Belgium.
If you chose to believe Ned Lawton's and Laura Almirall's disturbing report for the Refugee Council about how asylum procedures actually work in Ireland, you might wonder, like Michel, whether you, too, were getting something wrong. Procedures may not be blatantly racist, but they provoke a litany of adjectives ranging from unsympathetic to downright ignorant. Check out the summary being put up today on www.refugeecouncil.ie
The Government's left hand may be saying that racism is absolutely wrong and will not be tolerated. The right hand is insisting that 1,000 refugees a month are arriving, which has not yet been the case.
The Department of Justice is now trying to recruit staff for an area its own reports suggest must be among the most unpleasant to work in across the public service. Department officials are reportedly exploring the possibility of DNA-testing asylum-seekers' babies so as to ensure the fathers are who they say they are.
Having already alienated many doctors by floating the notion that doctors would report treating non-nationals to them lest they be "illegal", they now risk further public scandal by expecting small rural practices to cope with levels of problems rarely seen otherwise in Irish general practice.
Whatever combating racism means, it implies even-handedness. Today at least, the Government appears limp-wristed before the challenge.
mruane@irish-times.ie