Some years ago, when preparing to go to Papua New Guinea to do ecumenical work, I took part in a discussion with development workers during which the following story was told.
Some Germans working in Peru decided to have an open forum with the people they were there to serve, about how their project was progressing. One of the locals ventured the opinion that in their view it was immoral for the Germans to have left their country so far away and come to Peru. The German woman who had initiated the forum burst into tears.
The story illustrates something that Westerners, used to frequent business trips and tourist holidays, have all but forgotten: people traditionally have deep ties to land; to particular localities which are part of their identity.
People who value these traditions do not easily leave their homelands. The enormous global flow of refugees represents countless human tragedies of uprooting and alienation. The Irish should know this better than most.
In the cities racism is already rearing its ugly head. There are reasons for this: What about the Irish homeless? How to react when a familiar neighbourhood becomes a "little Africa"?
Religious leaders have begun feeling their way towards a moral basis for reassuring the natives while acknowledging the need for justice towards newcomers.
Father Ireneu Craciun of the Orthodox Church and Imam Yaya AlHussein of the Sunni Muslim community both lead rapidly growing religious minorities. Both are also opposed to the Government's policy of dispersing refugees and asylum-seekers throughout the country because it makes community-building impossible and alienates local people.
Four Catholic bishops made more far-reaching proposals. Noting last April that the backlog of unprocessed applications for asylum, and the numbers of those whose applications had been rejected but were still living in the State, had become unmanageable, they proposed "regularising their position on a once-off basis".
A poster currently in use bears the heading: "Christians should know all about refugees - their founder was one!" The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism has produced a coloured brochure illustrating the many sites associated with the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt.
These parallels are not as simplistic as they may seem. The people now streaming into Europe from all corners of the world created by European colonialism are desperate.
The unimaginable prosperity of the West has been dangled before them by the media but withheld from them by politicians and the inexorable logic of global capitalism.
There are signs that the initial knee-jerk reactions are giving way to the realisation that racism must be actively combated in order to create "an environment which recognises refugees as persons who enrich society" (Justice Minister John O'Donoghue).
As an Australian, I can only endorse this. It is almost ready to confront its racist past and bring about reconciliation with its remaining Aboriginal people.
I look forward to living in an Ireland which has made a similar transition.
Dr John May has taught interfaith dialogue at the Irish School of Ecumenics since 1987.