Who said the following?: "Many of our people emigrated to the far corners of the earth and no other nation has a history of emigration dating back as far as ours. Emigration is no stranger to Ireland and there is not a family in the land that has not seen its sons and daughters go abroad to work because of the depressed economy in times past, writes Fintan O'Toole
"One does not have to tell an Irish family where Paddington Station is, and we all know that Henry Ford's was a ready source of employment in Dagenham. Too many of our parents and children have first-hand knowledge of the sight of the Statue of Liberty as they sailed into the promised land, and Australia is much more than a place in an atlas to many of us"?
Mary Robinson? No. Stand up the man who is now bidding to be the Enoch Powell of Gurranebraher, the Fianna Fáil TD Noel O'Flynn, speaking in the Dáil on November 24th, 1999. This is the same man who has taken to calling asylum-seekers: "the spongers, the freeloaders, the people screwing the system" and spewing out the age-old line, so often used about Irish emigrants, that these dirty foreigners carry disease: "There should be compulsory health checks for all illegals so that our heath system is protected and our disease eradication programmes are not interfered with."
The smallest of Noel O'Flynn's sins is hypocrisy. He knows all about emigration but flaunts a wilful ignorance of immigration. He has been happy in the past to have his picture taken with refugees from Kosovo, when their cause was popular, talking about "the wonderful reception they had received from Irish people, particularly those of Cork and Kerry. To me that was what a real Irish welcome should be and I was proud to be an Irishman welcoming them to Cork and Kerry." But he is happy to smear people whose claims for refugee status have not yet been heard.
HYPOCRISY, though, is par for the course on this issue. What is far worse is the reckless disregard for human life. Noel O'Flynn's original comments were made before Irish society crossed a foul watershed with the racist killing of Zhao Liu Tao in Dublin. As such, they might just about be written off as the gombeen ignorance of a parish-pump politician looking for any available weapon with which to fight a tight general election contest in a key marginal.
Last week, however, after Zhao Liu Tao's grim death, Noel O'Flynn chose to pour more oil on the fire. He used the privilege of the Dáil, where he is beyond the reach of the Incitement to Hatred Act, to provide every thug in search of a victim with a ready-made excuse. Knowing full well that a Chinese immigrant had been attacked and killed on the street, he chose to accuse "illegal immigrants" in general of "misbehaviour on the streets", of having "chosen a life of crime" and, most seriously, of "causing hostile public reaction because of their antisocial behaviour and abuse of Irish hospitality".
Imagine - and as the family of Robert Hamill could tell you, it doesn't need much imagination - a young Catholic man beaten to death on the streets of Portadown. An Ulster Unionist MLA who has previously made sectarian comments about Catholics being shifty and disease-ridden stands up at Stormont a few days later and talks about Catholics "causing hostile public reaction because of their antisocial behaviour". Wouldn't Bertie Ahern and John O'Donoghue and every other member of the Government be on every available TV and radio programme calling for that MLA's expulsion from the UUP and for David Trimble to make a major speech distancing himself from this vile rhetoric?
Yet what have we got from the Government in relation to Noel O'Flynn's nauseating claim that racist hostility is the fault of the victims? The strongest word they have mustered between them so far is "inappropriate".
WE ARE right now at the ugly moment that many of us have long feared would come, when racism is being actively fomented as a reaction to recession. Never mind that the imagery of a small island being swamped by a human tide of immigrants is a ludicrous lie. The latest migration estimates from the Central Statistics Office, covering the period April 2000 to April 2001 indicate that 46,200 people came into the State and 19,900 left: an addition of just 26,300 people.
Never mind either that by far the biggest category of immigrants was Irish citizens who had previously emigrated and were now coming back. Most of the remainder were from the UK, the US and the rest of the EU. Just over a quarter came from the rest of the world. The reason this category is deemed to be problematic is quite simple: racism.
The appalling failure of either Fianna Fáil or the Government as a whole to speak out with any conviction against Noel O'Flynn's vicious targeting of scapegoats suggests a willingness to pander to that racism. If Noel O'Flynn gets away with it, racist discourse will have become respectable.
The collective smearing of vulnerable groups of people will have been effectively endorsed as a legitimate election tactic. If O'Flynn is not expelled from Fianna Fáil, the toxic waste of racism can be dumped all over the political system.