Sir, – Iris Murdoch pondered much upon the difference between being "nice" and being "good". Your editorial, "The Pacific solution' ( Editorial, August 17th) comes down firmly on the side of those who prefer the applause of seeming virtue over the disagreeable graft of making tough decisions.
If Australia were to take your well-meaning advice, and welcome the 442 refugees presently incarcerated on the island of Nauru, how many more people would be encouraged to make the dangerous journey in rickety old boats towards Australia? In the course of 12 months, for every one of the 442 resettled in Australia, at least another 442 lives would have been lost, sunk without trace in the shark-infested waters of the Timor Sea.
The vast numbers of people who want to move from their country to a better life in the West simply cannot be accommodated, even in a country as large and as seemingly sparsely populated as Australia. Many problems that are besetting the world today are due to the very large increase in population.
In 50 years, to cite just four countries, the populations of Turkey, Syria, Nigeria and the Philippines have quadrupled, and the carbon footprint of that huge increase in population is about eight times that of each person that walked those countries 50 years ago.
With shrinking resources and the seas polluted with more and more plastics and at the same time dangerously overfished, it puts more pressure on the poor. They respond to that pressure by having more children, as large families combine meagre incomes, and with incomes combined, there may be enough left over to send one child to college and care for the parents in old age.
Most of us in Ireland are rich. We imagine we are not, or more insidiously we like to pretend we are not, and so we can avoid our personal responsibilities. It is so comforting to imagine that we are virtuous and that there are rich nasty Tories out there who are spoiling it for everyone else. It fits in nicely with the story books of our toddler years and it absolves us from having to do anything other than insisting that governments tweak the situation with little gestures, without really concerning ourselves if these gestures will cause more harm than good.
We live in a global village, and the poorest amongst us in Ireland are members of the minor aristocracy of the global village. We are rich, most of the rest of the world is poor beyond the Marie Antoinette imaginings of our western democracies. We poach doctors and nurses from the developing world, a world where children die of simple infections. We steal their doctors so we can treat diseases that are manifestations of our materialistic lifestyle, diseases such as obesity, addictions and depression.
If there were just 30 million people on this planet needing our assistance and needing to be resettled in the West, I should be writing to congratulate you on your humanity. As the numbers wishing to escape poverty and oppression and make the journey to the West can be added up in the hundreds of millions, then we need to take another approach. In the West we need to grow up and to stop seeing the world through the comforting but idiotic prism of left and right. In the words of the late Jo Cox, we need to remind ourselves that there is “far more that unites us than divides us”. Hugely difficult problems are going to assail the planet over the next 50 years; if we don’t deal with them now, and deal with them with compassion and good sense, then the world we leave our grandchildren will not be worth the legacy of their lives. – Yours, etc,
KEVIN RYAN,
Richmond,
London.