Of course, the r-word raised its dismal head during the recent constitutional referendum campaign. Some individuals who write for a living even thought their vocation gave them a particular moral authority to pronounce en masse on the issue. Why is this? asks Kevin Myers
What vanity in the authorial soul compels scribblers to think their combined opinion is more important than group letters on the same issue from plumbers, gardeners, brewers or butchers' boys? Then we got the allegation, as uttered by Inez McCormack, that the "race card was being played": that's always a good way of winning arguments in the salons of the bien-pensant, even if neither the referendum nor proposed legislation mentions race.
It's the old liberal principle of getting your moral superiority in first.
And maybe - as some have averred - the colossal majority supporting the referendum is proof that most Irish people are racists. But if that is so, is it wise to admit large numbers of foreigners into the midst of such a hostile native population? However, our salon liberals continue to pronounce on the glories of "multiculturalism", just as they denounce the injustices they perceive are done to the Traveller community. Of course, the culture, habits, social services and religious ways of the ideological multiculturalists in their expensive, middle-class, white Irish ghettoes will not in any way be altered by the mass immigration of large numbers of poor foreigners, or indeed by the arrival of 40 Traveller caravans at an improvised halting site in their midst.
Are we racists? Well, it certainly looks like that. What other judgment can you reach when our political system is so intrinsically tribal? Even the party names, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, are exultations of racial self, though of course - as with all "racial" aspirations - they are entirely hokum. Sinn Féin's racist pedigree is almost irreproachable. Founded by the anti-Semite Arthur Griffith, it must be the only surviving political party which allied itself with the Nazis and yet survived to be represented in the European Parliament today.
So how splendidly elegant that Mary Lou McDonald MEP may now seek to enter the European Parliament within the Left-Communist grouping. Ah. Just like the good old days, and the Hitler-Ribbentrop pact. This is before we even begin to consider Sinn Féin-IRA's more recent multicultural pedigree - the Shankill fish-shop, the Whitecross massacre, Enniskillen, La Mon and that other well-known atrocity, Et Cetera. Moreover, the first Pakistanis to have been murdered in Ireland were dispatched because they sold tea to British soldiers. So would our pretty little she-Shinner expound upon these interesting little exercises in republican multicultural tolerance to her fellow-lefty MEPs when she gets to Strasbourg?
But it's equally improbable that any discussion here in Ireland about immigration will be free of soap-box posturing. Indeed, is it possible even to ask questions about what we know of immigration elsewhere? Or is intellectual evasion to be our safe option, as we decline to discuss seriously the future of this country? Will we ask ourselves the sort of questions which we need to ask now? Or will we take a long swim in that river of delusion known as Denial?
What is the percentage of racial and religious difference we want in any community in Ireland over the next 20 years? Is, say, Athlone to be 1 per cent Muslim? 10 per cent? 40 per cent? 50 per cent? 100 per cent? Are these reasonable questions or unreasonable ones? Is it racist to ask them? (But how can it be, if Islam is non-racial?) How many Nigerians is Ballina to get? And just who decided that the Chinese population of Dublin should soar into the tens of thousands within just a few years? These are deep waters, of a kind hardly touched by rational public debate in Britain, and not remotely so in Ireland, where we have just passed through yet another liberal posturing competition with the main winners being the sanctimonious spouters of the most unprincipled and opportunistic "anti-racist" vacuities.
Only an absolute cretin makes a judgment about a person because of their "race", whatever that might mean, and only a criminal cretin abuses a person because of their race. Moreover, the central issue might not even be "race": it is how existing communities with long-established habits can cope with the sudden arrival of large numbers of strangers. If a large group of Nigerian Catholic Ibo, or Muslim Hausa-Fulani, or white Alabama Baptists, or Amish folk from Pennsylvania, or a caravan of Bedouin, or a party of Irish Travellers, moved into a town in the Republic, which over time would become more accepted? The Ibo, I suspect: in which case, race would barely be a determinant at all.
What was truly depressing about the recent discussions about immigration was their abject, pious cowardice. This is utterly self-defeating, because over the next 20 years, we are certain to be a magnet for mass immigration. We are incredibly rich, need cheap labour, and have a low population density; yet amid these certainties, we seem incapable of seriously discussing the major changes that are inevitably coming our way.
So as usual, we publicly pretend everything is well, while in town and country small communities grumble in private over relatively small numbers of immigrants - until finally some internal anger explodes, and a few hotheads seize a GPO or two.
It's not too late. We can calmly work out how we will manage immigration over the next few years; or we can strut like moral turkey-cocks, proudly clucking "racist" at the baffled and less fortunate who are simply frightened of change.