There is one term which we should have banned long ago in the discussion about racism in Ireland. It is the sanctimonious weasel-term "asylum-seeker", with its implication of refugeedom from tyranny preventing any reasoned conversation about the actual growth of both immigration and of racism here. Of course, it makes the bien-pensants who use it feel morally superior; and moral superiority has always been one of the most high-mindedly popular and insidiously dangerous aspects of the race debate anywhere.
In Britain, arrogant, middle-class liberals attributed the upheavals in working-class areas after the arrival of huge numbers of people of a different culture, race, religion, diet, shape and smell to the intolerance and racism of the natives.
Hampstead socialists might have wondered how it was that the working classes - in whom they ideologically reposed so much faith - could so unfailingly let them down; but instead they preferred to blame Enoch Powell, who, with his infamous "rivers of blood" speech, had become the single most popular politician among the English working classes.
Bourgeois condescension
Why? Because he spoke for them. He uttered the heretical truth that the face of urban Britain was being changed for ever, that new and irreversible forces were being released by massive immigration into old, tight-knit, mono-cultural and mono-racial working-class communities. To denounce the perfectly understandable human incomprehension and confusion at these changes simply as "racism" was bourgeois condescension at its most arrogant and insensitive.
Enoch Powell facilitated that condescension. The language he used was both inflammatory and inaccurate. It shifted the authorship of racist violence from whites to immigrants, when the traffic was overwhelmingly in the opposite direction. Between them, Powell and his liberal opponents made it impossible to discuss the gravest and most enduring changes to have occurred to the English proletariat since the industrial revolution.
In the largely liberal-enforced silence which resulted, poisonous racist sub-cultures emerged like unlanced boils among the young, white working class, spreading into, and often corrupting, local police forces. This happened in large part not in spite of, but actually because of, middle-class, liberal sneers that to be unhappy about the changes happening in your area made you a racist. Thus "racism" for those so labelled became a badge of honour, a mark of realism and of national identity. And the ideological, linguistic and moral tyranny of liberals was made even more odious and hypocritical by its imposition from districts where outsiders were few and where a black face meant a GP and an Indian face an accountant: such faces did not mean the virtual eradication overnight of neighbourhood cultural norms which had been in existence for generations.
Linguistic dishonesty
We are far from having immigration on that scale in Ireland, but already the debate is steeped in censorious high-mindedness and linguistic dishonesty on the ship's bridge, even as the secret fires of racist bigotry spread through the coal-holds below.
Taxi-drivers are already mouthing the brainless "asylum-seeker" anecdotes which are the symptoms of emerging social tensions; and I regretfully believe the letter on this page last Saturday from a dark American visitor who told of hostile stares from young Irish people.
People are not fools all of the time. We cannot pretend that black people coming here generally are "asylum-seekers". They are immigrants, legal or illegal, looking for economic opportunity, just as tens of thousands of Irish immigrants, legal or illegal, are in the United States for precisely the same reason. Let us call these people immigrants. And let us be absolutely sure that even while middle-class liberals - whose residential areas are immune to large-scale immigration because of property prices - loftily denounce racism, in poor, working-class areas where immigrants are arriving, genuine racist tensions are starting to grow.
I haven't got a clue how to defuse these tensions, but I'm sure a good start is honesty - and honesty is not something we're particularly good at, even as "niggers go home" graffiti deface walls in red-brick, working-class areas of Dublin. The immigration which is occurring now is drastically different from the sort of immigration we have received before - which was largely of white Christians.
It is simplistic to dwell on our debt to that assimilable and racially indistinguishable immigration of the past when we know that poor Muslims from Bangladesh and Rastafarians from Jamaica are a different kettle of genes and culture altogether.
Racist and insulting
That is the kettle that is arriving, and we must accept it. It is both practically purposeless and morally unacceptable to have immigration officers standing at Amiens Street looking for dusky complexions arriving on the Belfast train. Such filtration procedures are primitive, racist and insulting for all concerned.
We simply must accept that people travelling from the UK should have automatic right of entry here. If a few thousand illegals get in, so be it.
Yes, and there will be the D & D problems - dole-fiddling and dope-smuggling - and no doubt various other disagreeable aspects to immigration, just as Irish builders virtually pioneered the "lump" in Britain and smuggled hooch into prohibition America. Equally, there will be the advantages of cultural and culinary diversity - but these might not be so obvious to poor, bewildered people in the Liberties (or wherever) who will dislike the changes happening to their areas. To dismiss such unhappiness as racist, and not heed it, is to repeat the errors in England. Just for once, are we capable of learning from the experience of others?