MOROCCO: TV images of African migrants, bleeding profusely from wounds sustained climbing razor-wire fences, have pushed the issue of immigration back towards the top of the agenda of European leaders.
On Monday the Spanish and French prime ministers, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Dominique de Villepin, agreed in Barcelona to propose an "audacious" integrated plan on this question to the next meeting of the European Council on October 27th, though its details remain vague.
The razor-wire fences have been erected to prevent migrants entering Spain's enclaves in Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla. But they are really the front line in the European Union's undeclared war against a rising tide of human misery.
There is, of course, nothing new about migrants and asylum-seekers risking their lives to reach what they imagine is the economic and political sanctuary of the EU. We in Ireland have seen the lethal results of poverty and human trafficking in corpses arriving in containers at Rosslare harbour.
But Spain's proximity to Africa means it is the favoured destination for Moroccans, Algerians and sub-Saharan Africans. Hundreds attempt perilous sea crossings every month on pathetically inadequate rafts. Many of them drown.
However, to media addicted to novelty, tragedy repeated becomes tragedy ignored. It has taken the recent cycle of dramatic events around Ceuta and Melilla to generate yet another wake-up call. One must hope, without any great confidence, that this time our politicians will respond appropriately.
Vice-president of the European Commission Franco Frattini said last week that 30,000 sub-Saharan Africans were already gathering in Morocco and Algeria with a view to breaching the Spanish enclaves, and that that number was going to increase fast. The sight of people literally bleeding to enter our citadel makes the nightmare of Fortress Europe embarrassingly real.
There is no doubt that the migrants, and more especially the 21st-century equivalents of slave-traders who exploit them so viciously, are aware of the impact of shocking media images.
We know from Irish experience that emigration is often the option of the best-informed and most resourceful of an impoverished population.
The mobile phone, as well as the TV screen, has been vital in transmitting information about the ghastly situation in the enclaves and in Morocco over the last few weeks. It was mobile phones which enabled migrants, who had been dumped in the desert without food, water or medical supplies by the Moroccan authorities, to get the message of their plight to journalists and aid workers.
And, in fact, it is the position taken by Morocco which has been the real novelty of the last month. Rabat has traditionally claimed - and still does - that Spain's relationship with Ceuta and Melilla is an illegitimate relic of colonial power. In the past, Moroccans have been reluctant to energetically assist the Spanish in preventing illegal immigration across a frontier they do not formally recognise.
However, in the past few weeks that situation has been transformed. This is partly because the relationship between the two countries has improved significantly since Zapatero came to office in Madrid.
Nevertheless, he is now deeply embarrassed by the zeal displayed by his new friends.
Not only have Moroccan forces shot dead at least eight unarmed migrants in clashes around the enclaves, there is very good evidence that, despite official denials, Rabat at least briefly embarked on a policy of abandoning migrants to death by starvation and exposure on its desert borders.
Such policies are not only repugnant to human rights, they simply do not work, as witnessed by the willingness of migrants who have been rescued in the desert to run the same risks again.
Their desperation is a graphic indication of the catastrophic social, economic and political misery in which much of Africa remains mired.
It is encouraging that Zapatero and de Villepin agreed this week that this problem cannot be addressed solely in security terms, but must engage with the question of "development".
However, the failure of so many well-intentioned schemes to help Africa develop over the past five decades must make us wary that pious aspirations will once again be applied as a sticking plasters to the continent's chronic wounds.
Clearly, Europe will be unable to absorb unlimited African immigration without a degree of social dislocation which most of us would find unacceptable.
But this knowledge should lead us to question why we have so long regarded it as quite acceptable, if unfortunate, that most Africans should live in poverty while Europe props up African dictatorships, makes fortunes out of arms sales to African warlords and underwrites brutally unfair trading conditions.
Only a root-and-branch rethink of our relationship to Africa, coupled with the kind of generous commitment of resources which made the Marshall Plan a success, will do anything to stop determined young Africans from hurling themselves at the razor-wire on our castle walls.