There was not just one holocaust during the Nazi era. There were several. The Jews were, of course, the prime victims, but second in the list of victims of those genocides were the gypsy population of eastern and central Europe. It is estimated that over half-a-million gypsies were gassed in the Nazi concentration camps, along with the four million Jews.
The gypsies were singled out for special treatment. German scientists conducted experiments on them, the most notable being how long human beings could last on salt and water.
The gypsy community survived the massacres, and there are now about five million in eastern Europe. It is believed that their ancestors came from India about a thousand years ago. Forty per cent of them live in Romania (2.1 million), where until the 1830s they were enslaved.
The same racism that fuelled the genocide manifests itself today in many eastern European countries, in discrimination and barbarism towards gypsies. It is particularly marked in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania.
A report produced by a human rights organisation, the European Centre for Roma Rights, on the treatment of the gypsy population in Romania reads very like an exaggerated version of similar reports done on human rights in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. It reports repeated attacks on, and at times murders of, gypsies; the regular fire-bombing of gypsy villages; police and judicial indifference to these; police victimisation of the gypsy community; police beatings and tortures; and pervasive discrimination against them throughout Romanian society.
It is from this community and from this situation that some 30 to 40 recent gypsy arrivals at Wexford have come. We have had a glimpse of the racism directed at them by the refusal of other Romanian asylum-seekers to share accommodation with them and the characterisation of the gypsy community as "trouble-makers".
Unquestionably, these people are political refugees. They should be treated as such, given asylum without delay and given the means to integrate into Irish society.
But have they made a good choice in coming here? Our treatment of the travelling community has been infected with the same kind of racism (albeit on a lesser scale) as has affected the gypsies in Romania, and the hysteria generated by the trickle of immigrants displays a gigantic insensitivity to what is involved.
There are 21 million refugees under the care of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). According to the head of UNHCR there are a further 25 million refugees worldwide. Most of these are in Africa, many more in Asia.
In the last 10 years there have been about four million asylum applications to EU countries. In the same period there have been fewer than 10,000 applications for asylum in Ireland.
According to the 1992 United Nations Human Development Report (later reports do not deal with the issue), "At least 35 million people from developing countries have taken up residence in [developed countries] in the past three decades, around six million illegally, and about 1.5 million more join them each year". There are about 50,000 people in Ireland from outside the EU, and only possibly 20,000 of them are from the developed world.
The percentage of foreign residents in Australia is 21 per cent, 8 per cent in the United States and 4 per cent for Europe. It is less than 1 per cent in Ireland.
The number of applications here for asylum this year, up to July 31st, was 3,064. For the whole of last year it was 3,883; for 1996, 1,179; for 1994, 363; and for 1993, 91.
Yes, there has been a huge percentage rise in the number of applications, but from a base that was ridiculously low. In 1993, for instance, the total number of asylum applications in the EU was 553,000, and the 91 applications in Ireland that year represented 0.016 per cent of the European total.
I do not have the figure for the total number of asylum applications for the EU for 1997 but, at a guess, it was probably around 300,000 (the EU figure has been falling). The Irish figure represents about 1.3 per cent of the likely EU total.
And some people think we have a crisis.
There is indeed a crisis, but it is not for us Irish residents, rather it is for the asylum-seekers here.
Whereas there have been 9,003 applications for asylum here since 1993 (until July 31st this year), only 1,096 have been processed. The Department of Justice says there are about 6,000 now being processed, The opposition parties in the Dail proposed last May that an amnesty be given to all asylumseekers. That would have gone some way towards redressing the injustice done to them by leaving them hanging on for so long.
The Government refused, having been recommended to do so by an interdepartmental committee. It was thought that the granting of an amnesty would encourage a "flood" of asylumseekers here. John O'Donoghue said that if an amnesty were granted to the 6,000 on the waiting list, this would work out at a total "influx" of about 30,000 aliens, when family members who would think themselves entitled to follow were taken into account.
Even if this ludicrous estimate of the follow-through effect was accepted, what would be so awful about having a total of 30,000 more people here from outside the EU? And even if not one of them was a "genuine" political refugee and every one of them was an economic refugee, so what?
In 1990 there were an estimated 130,000 illegal Irish immigrants in the United States. The Irish government at the time lobbied the White House and Congress to grant them an amnesty. Not one of these was a political refugee; all were "economic refugees" with a very much lesser claim to the refugee tag than any of those now applying here for asylum.
Of course, there would be problems of racism and of ghettoisation if a relatively sizeable "influx" were now permitted. But whose fault would they be? And if we treated these immigrants fairly and decently they could enrich this monoglot society, bringing variation to our culture, our style, our language and our mentality.
Instead, all the indications are that we are toughening our stance on asylum-seekers. Last year 513 decisions were made on asylum applications. Of these 209 were approved and 304 refused. But of the 304 refusals, 120 were allowed to remain here on what is known as "humanitarian leave". Thus 64 per cent were allowed to remain.
In contrast, so far this year (up to July 31st) there have been 426 decisions, only 53 approvals, and 373 refusals, and nobody has been allowed stay on humanitarian leave, only 12 per cent being allowed remain.
The shutters are coming down.