Michael McDowell is to be congratulated on his change of mind regarding Nigerian student Olukunle Elukanlo, who will probably be the happiest student in Ireland when he sits the Leaving Certificate this summer, writes Breda O'Brien.
It takes courage to change one's mind, in the full knowledge that you will be derided for having to make a U-turn by the Opposition, the same Opposition which days earlier was decrying the original decision. However, Olukunle could have been given humanitarian leave to remain in the first place.
The Department of Justice is slow to exercise this option, which permits people who do not meet the narrow criteria for asylum to remain in Ireland. Given that applications for asylum are quite often processed slowly, there are numerous instances of people who have set down roots and consider themselves to be "new Irish", but who are then deported. Many of them could be given humanitarian leave to remain, but are not.
Olukunle's temporary return is in part a tribute to the solidarity demonstrated by his fellow students in Palmerstown Community School. This solidarity shows that there is a mismatch between official policy and the attitude of ordinary people, and it is not the first we have seen in recent years.
Not long after the Government announced that it was reneging on its commitment to reach the target of 0.7 per cent of GDP in aid to the developing world, we had the extraordinary outpouring of generosity by Irish people for victims of the tsunami. Before that, the Special Olympics showed that, given the right leadership, voluntarism and service is far from dead in Ireland.
Perhaps our political leaders are missing something. It is clear that the canny Bertie is aware of it, too, with his attempts to project a more "caring and sharing" face of Fianna Fáil.
Mary Harney and Michael McDowell can be fielded as tough, economic liberals, leaving Fianna Fáil to claim that they are really socialists who just happen to have donned a very convincing disguise as pro-business pragmatists. However, political parties still don't get it if they think it is about positioning themselves on a left-right divide.
In a fascinating recent book, Conflict and Consensus: A Study of Values and Attitudes in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, Tony Fahey, Bernadette Hayes and Richard Sinnott demonstrate convincingly that we are amiably confused when it comes to the distinction between left and right.
We may identify ourselves in surveys as left of centre, and then go on to espouse views which are more in tune with a right-of-centre approach. The authors conclude that "to be on the left in either part of Ireland has more to do with adopting liberal or mildly anti-establishment attitudes on religious and personal moral issues than with standard socialist views on how the economy should be organised".
Nor is the divide, when it comes to values, between Catholics and Protestants, but between "the devout and the lukewarm". The word "lukewarm" is well chosen. The authors conclude that there has been no massive swing to atheism or agnosticism, and even those who do not identify themselves with a church have a high degree of belief in God, and wish for religious ceremonies as rites of passage.
Protestants and Catholics who are committed to their faith resemble each other in their values much more than would have been suspected. The divide, such as it is, is between those who are more secularised and those who are more committed to religious faith.
Yet even this divide is not as striking as it is elsewhere in Europe. The overall picture is of "moderate conservatism, with some leanings towards more liberal attitudes, but no strong shift in that direction". This is particularly true in relation to what might be called "family values".
Although people are more tolerant of single-parent families, they remain supportive of the ideal of children being raised by two parents. In relation to abortion, the authors suggest that by European standards we retain an exceptionally conservative outlook.
Differences between Protestants and Catholics on this issue shrink when placed against European norms. Catholics and Protestants resemble each other far more regarding disapproval of abortion than we do our European neighbours.
By coincidence, another book I am reading, this time by an American author, also touches on these themes. Its title, God's Politics, by Jim Wallis, is enough to make most Irish politicians and media people blanch.
His thesis is that the American right may have hijacked the language of faith to prop up its political agenda, but it is an agenda with which many people of faith disagree. However, the left remains resolutely tone-deaf to faith, and as a result fails to speak to many American people.
Jim Wallis is an evangelical Christian. He is the founder of Sojourners, a network of Christians right across the United States, people whose politics might be summed up as pro-justice, pro-peace, pro-environment, pro-family and pro-consistent ethic of life.
The late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago coined the term "consistent ethic of life" . He believed it was not ethically consistent to be anti-abortion but pro-capital punishment, or anti-abortion and pro-war.
In fact, with minor variations, Jim Wallis's version of how faith and politics should intersect sounds very relevant to Ireland. Left and right still mean something as political terms in the United States, though less so than before. In Ireland they never meant that much. Unlike his native country, Jim Wallis would probably be pushing an open door here when it comes to his agenda of conservative family values coupled with concern for social justice.
Despite my own tongue-in-cheek identification last week of pragmatism as the central characteristic of Irish identity, the evidence contradicts me. Politicians with aspirations to real leadership might begin to question why values like solidarity are so neglected in political discourse.
Disenchantment with politics is an international phenomenon, but in Ireland, perhaps low voter turnout is connected to the assumption by politicians that we are primarily interested in being shiny, happy consumers. That assumption fails to give space for expression of values that enrich all our lives, not least the values of solidarity and compassion.