As she looked shyly across the roomful of strangers, Katie's glance hovered for a tiny moment around Seán's ruggedly handsome features. He was talking in an animated manner to his friends, laughing and joking with a breezy confidence that made her all the more conscious of her own unease. She looked away but found that she could not resist stealing another quick glance, writes Fintan O'Toole.
This time, their eyes met. He held her gaze coolly, brazenly, but with a warm tenderness that held her transfixed. She blushed as she looked down to the floor, but she knew now that every beat of her heart was bringing him a step closer to her. She knew that they would talk and meet again and kiss and make love and that, before the year was out, he would ask her to marry him.
And she would say, her voice shaking with tender rapture: "Yes, my darling, let's ask Brian Lenihan if it's okay."
This, my friends, is the shape of Irish chick-lit to come. In a move that makes Mills & Boon look believable, Brian Lenihan last week published legislation that will give him the right to decide whether some couples will be allowed to marry. You couldn't make it up but you don't have to. There, in black print on white paper, is one of the most extraordinary provisions ever included in Irish legislation.
The Immigration Bill will, if passed, lay down that "A marriage purportedly contracted in the State between two persons one or each of whom is a foreign national is invalid in law" unless the Minister for Justice is notified three months in advance. The Minister can refuse permission outright on a number of grounds, including the vague catch-all that the marriage "would not be in the interests of public security, public policy or public order". Essentially, a politician will have the personal power to decide whether an Irish citizen can marry a foreigner, or whether two foreigners can marry each other. "Public policy" may decree that Katie and Seán aren't the right sort to marry each other.
Not only that, but the Bill will criminalise any priest or registrar who performs a wedding ceremony for two people who do not have the Minister's permission to marry. The wording would seem, in fact, to criminalise anyone who is a witness at such a ceremony, or even someone who drives the happy couple to the altar: "A person who knowingly a) solemnises or permits the solemnisation of a form of marriage which is, under this section, not a valid marriage, b) is a party to such a form of marriage, or c) facilitates such a form of marriage, shall be guilty of an offence."
Readers may imagine that these extraordinary provisions are being put forward as a way to stop foreign people contracting marriages with Irish citizens for no other reason than to acquire residency rights. But this is not so - Irish law does not at the moment confer any such rights by reason of marriage alone and the Bill elsewhere re-enforces this state of affairs. So the Bill's bizarre powers are simply an exercise in absurdly overbearing control-freakery.
What's happening here is an extreme example of the way normally sensible people lose the run of themselves when it comes to immigration. If, in any other area, the Government took to itself such sweeping powers to interfere in personal and family life, people would be up in arms. One would expect the churches, for example, to be rather upset about the notion that Brian Lenihan should take the place of God in the sacrament of marriage. But when it comes to legislating for migration, the first impulse is to punish, to control, to suspect.
The rules of good government - transparency, accountability, proportionality - don't apply to immigration. Even while the Immigration Bill is trying to bring some welcome rationality to an area that has been governed by chaotic and outmoded rules, it undoes much of its good work by giving the Minister for Justice unaccountable powers. "Public security, public policy or public order" is a catch-all that sets aside all notions of transparent decision-making. Once the minister invokes it, he or she has no more explaining to do. The grounds of any such decision don't have to be explained to the person who is subject to it. And if the person challenges a ruling in court, "the minister shall not be obliged to disclose the source of information upon which he or she formed the opinion".
The problem with all of this is not just that it gives far too much power to an individual politician, but that it infects the whole question of immigration with a taint of paranoia. Launching the Bill last week, Brian Lenihan pointed out that "There is a prevalent view in some quarters that most immigrants are here either unlawfully or on some spurious basis: but nothing could be further from the truth." Is it any wonder, though, that negative views might prevail in "some quarters" when all the signals from his own department are that immigrants are a dangerous, shifty lot, who can't be trusted with ordinary democratic procedures and who can't even be allowed to marry except under the stern and watchful eye of the Minister.