You know what it's like. You're being careful with what you say when suddenly a word pops out that gives the game away. In better times, you could claim it's a malapropism that happens to the best of us. Not in this shameful week. The mouth was John O'Donoghue's. The subject was the crisis in refugee services. The word was "swamped". Images sprang to mind of pagan hordes from dirty, primitive places, attacking our island of saints and scholars: being "swamped" is apparently what will happen if Ireland does not take a firm line on immigration and asylum-seeking.
Prime Time viewers must have clutched their sprays of shamrock to their breasts. What Mr O'Donoghue once called "the will of the people" is changing - for the worse. Since Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats took office, racist skeletons in this society have come right out of the closet.
Government policies may not have been intentionally racist, but racism is rising as a direct by-product of what has, or has not, been done. Whereas in December 1997 more than two-thirds of the population refused to countenance tougher measures against refugees and asylum-seekers, the chances are that any contemporary survey would diminish that figure considerably. Media hype has promoted a sense of alarm. Negative public opinion has been allowed to build to the point where tougher regulations leading to greater human exclusion are tolerated.
Racism has flourished in poorer ghettos, where competition among the weaker members of society is sufficient to explain it, although not justify it. Hot on the heels of UK debates about being a "soft touch" and encouraged by New Labour spin doctors with a view to managing public opinion for changes in immigration procedures there next April, the middle classes are now wondering if Ireland is a "soft touch", too.
The question is whether the Government and the Department of Justice have knowingly or otherwise enabled a hardening of racist attitudes for their own longer-term interests. Most asylum and immigration procedures now operate by ministerial order, rather than arising from the democratic vision of the Refugee Act that Mr O'Donoghue fought so hard to realise when in opposition.
Complicated procedures make it hard for refugees and asylum-seekers to gain work permits and force them to live on social welfare. No independent appeals commissioner has been appointed, despite a candidate being recommended in May 1997.
The legal challenge mounted by Mr Paddy Cooney, who contends that Civil Service commissioners changed the rules midway through the application process, only now faces the prospect of having its day in court.
The State's historical isolationist stance hardly makes us the best spokespeople for other peripheral peoples. At least we escaped the excesses of having been an imperialist power. But are we buying into a fake history now?
In its rush to embrace the new Europe, the State has forgotten the insights its peripheral, vernacular history can yield.
Since the Schengen Agreement, which was encouraged particularly by the Department of Justice, Ireland has been quietly signing up to Fortress Europe, a bastion of white, Western European culture that inevitably builds a wall between what former the EU Commission president, Jacques Santer, called "the isle of richness" and "the sea of poverty". It is a more poetic way of distinguishing the swampy hordes from the fior-Gael occupants of our four green fields. Mr O'Donoghue is particularly concerned about maintaining the common travel area between Ireland and the United Kingdom. Does that concern oblige him to adopt UK immigration policy without a second thought?
The British approach to immigration has not changed in essence since Margaret Thatcher's reign. Her hardline attitude, formed in the days when Enoch Powell made his infamous "rivers of blood" speech, reflected a very particular attitude to Britain's colonial past. It did more to promote racism in British institutions than any overt policy could have achieved.
The UK is struggling with racism as a result. Isolating non-white immigrants made all nonwhites specially vulnerable: the Metropolitan Police's failure to properly investigate the murder of Stephen Lawrence is but a case in point. Such are the risks of current policy here. Even apart from the legal issues arising on the question of immigrants and refugees, muddy procedures encourage a view of "otherness". That augurs badly for other areas of social organisation.
HOW mighty the lowly have become. Seems like only yesterday that John O'Donoghue as opposition spokesman on justice barracked Nora Owen for ignoring human suffering and the will of the Irish people in her alleged prevarication on the never-to-be-implemented Refugee Act. "The status of refugees . . . should strike a chord with every man, woman and child here who has any grasp of Irish history," he said, "our history books being littered with the names and deeds of those driven from our country out of fear of persecution." No, Minister. History records the names of the few, the exceptions like Kennedys, Keatings, Fintan Lalors and O'Donovan Rossas. The majority remain faceless and nameless. They have effectively disappeared. We can blame our old imperial masters for some of it, but mostly we have to face the blame ourselves.
In this century virtually all who were driven from Ireland left because of bad economic, social and cultural policies generated by home-grown Irish governments. Much as we might wish to give priority in the Mount Street queues to refugees with the potential impact of a Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi or Puff Daddy, history suggests we will fail to recognise them. It's hard to spot greatness without the benefit of hindsight. For the moment, they, too, are destined to disappear into that fearful "swamp" against which Mr O'Donoghue is unusually determined to protect us.
Medb Ruane can be contacted at mruane@irish-times.ie