In Scotsman's Bay beside Dun Laoghaire harbour last year, a strangely memorable Ghost Ship dropped anchor for a few weeks. Periodically each night it glowed in the dark and people gasped at the magic. The ship touched something deep and fundamental, something we could recall but not quite name.
One year on and ghost ships wait to drift in ports around the island. Dublin, Waterford, Galway, Limerick and Cork - cities and communities whose age-old ties with the sea nourish local traditions - will gain floating monuments. Like the ship reclaimed in Dorothy Cross's Nissan-sponsored project, these vessels will touch on something fundamental. Unlike the Ghost Ship, we stand to lose at their sight.
The ships are not designed as public art, or public spectacle. In refugee and asylum-control speak, they are named flotels. Very shortly, the Government will decide whether to use these ships to house some asylum-seekers.
This latest gamble to devise a viableat least taking the accommodation crisis seriously. It also represents yet another episode in the can't-organise-a-drinking-bout-in-a-brewery mould that has so far characterised its plans.
The original Ghost Ship operated on the principle of occasional visibility - now you see it, now you don't. What you found when you watched it was a paradoxical sense of what had been forgotten. The Ghost Ship spoke of maritime history to the sailors, fishermen, cabin crews and passengers who lived, worked or lost their lives at sea. It humanised the waters.
The flotels, on the contrary, speak to a mindset more likely to recall television series such as The Love Boat. In that fantasy, refugees and prospective immigrants could entertain themselves on floating hotels while their applications were being processed, with the great merit of being mostly invisible to the land-locked islanders nearby. We might hear their music sometimes wafting over the sea, but we wouldn't have to watch them play.
The vessels won't dock in any of the ports, of course, or land consumers for shopping expeditions. With £15 a week disposable income, the passengers are not set up to be big spenders. Inevitably, the vessels will become spectacles. They will be a constant reminder of how lucky we are to be here, given that so many other people desperately want to be.
The passengers won't be e-commerce experts or Americans eager to discover their Irish heritage. The system already accommodates them by letting them work and visit. Days of tedium will have to be passed on board, fostering despair, indolence and resentment. Racist tension will rise to fulfil the prophecies of those against asylum-seekers. By the time passengers are permitted to start integrating they will have learned how to hate their administrative masters when all they tried to do was get a life.
Finding neat administrative solutions to the problem of admitting large numbers of people perplexed more powerful leaders than Bertie Ahern. When Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera faced the issue as Europe was heaving with migrants from many different backgrounds. Sean Lemass and Gerry Boland, the Justice and Industry Ministers, wanted to continue Ireland's isolationist policy. Dev disagreed. He argued (confidentially, so he probably meant it) that Ireland should instead adopt a "liberal and generous" attitude and be prepared to take in some 10,000 "aliens", as Dermot Keogh's research reveals.
De Valera drew a line in the sand. At a time when Ireland was economically on its knees, certain principles were more important than national self-interest - and national self-interest could be principled too. De Valera lost, but some 20 years later the Israeli government planted a forest of 10,000 trees in his name just outside Nazareth, a special place to him.
The turnaround since Dev's day is that for the most part national self-interest rates higher than principles. Yet the current Taoiseach is fortunate in encountering a time when principles and self-interest for once coincide. The land of Bertie.com wants workers and needs a human face too. So why is Bertie putting on his Blueshirt guise?
Bertie's travels in Australia showed how deaf he has become to the rhythm of his own heritage. Lured by Jack Straw's colonialist asylum and immigration songs, he heads for the rocks like a sailor so smitten by Sirens he doesn't realise his craft is at risk. Those detention centres he did or did not admire were first introduced to house "unruly" Aboriginal peoples, expanding later when Australia's canvassing of white European peoples went badly wrong and brought instead increasing numbers of yellow and black skins to its shores.
The lesson Oz teaches is that a developing economy finds it almost impossible to screen the kind of immigrants it attracts, unless it invokes an unfair admission policy. Bertie didn't see that. Bertie peers into the rumoured abyss and declaims with as much feeling as he can muster "the horror, the horror" when all he has to do is set things straight.
It can be simple. Grant asylum for outstanding cases, operate a quota system for future non-EU nationals, and devise a lottery method for so-called non-skilled borderline cases. Ireland could network in a planned way while keeping the international respect earned for it by leaders like de Valera and Mary Robinson. The State would save most of the £55 million it spends currently through procrastination, and if by some miraculous intervention the policy managed to cohere with overseas aid budgets, so much the better.
Bertie the Blueshirt is teaching his people an interesting lesson. It's about the joy of clicking your leather-booted heels, of making yourself feel big and powerful by exercising control over others. Hey, look how tough he is - they're all so impressed. "One of the world's great minds, penetrating, compassionate and resolute . . .", the diplomat Max Nurock said of de Valera. Strange how Dev's successor fails to see beyond the trees.