Multicultural Man of the Year must surely be the illegal immigrant Ciprian Mircescu who recently escaped imprisonment for a spot of baby battering.
While caring for his girlfriend's baby, he managed to fracture its skull and cause bleeding to the baby's brain. He says he was shaking it, but who is to say?
In the Circuit Criminal Court, Judge Desmond Hogan chose not to impose a custodial sentence. "What happened was of the utmost seriousness but seems to have arisen from cultural differences with regards to children. The child is now getting on well and both parents are now acting responsibility." Cultural differences is right. Ciprian Mircescu is not the father of the child, though apparently an Irish judge can declare he is a parent even when he isn't. That's just one part of Irish culture which might baffle our worthy visitor from Romania.
On the other hand, it might come as surprise to most people that baby-battering is an acceptable part of Romanian culture. Certainly news to me. Maybe Bucharest has regular baby-battering contests, possibly done to music and rather in the style of Morris dancing, with the winner being the man who can break the most skulls without actually killing any children.
In which case, what a rich vein of ancient Moldavian folk-art is here in the shape of this "asylum-seeker". He arrived in Ireland two days after the baby concerned - the rather splendidly named Kevin - was born, then applying for asylum on the grounds that he was the father. And if anything indicates the legal and institutional slum that our law has been reduced to by the mumbo-jumbo of asylum seeker codology, then it is this: that one can seek asylum because of paternity.
Asylum has nothing to do with sexual intercourse. None of the various Geneva Conventions on the subject says that because one has copulated with a woman one has the automatic right to live in whatever land her offspring might emerge. Not even the more witless UN rulings on refugees and asylum-seekers command member-states to give residence on such grounds. Only in Ireland, where sanctimonious fatuity has cross-bred with political cowardice to produce that mewling, puking, bastard child, Querulous Multiculturalism, could such a plea be made.
But it gets even better. It soon turned out that Ciprian Mircescu wasn't even the father of the child after all. Someone else was. So he withdrew the claims for asylum. But now that he was no longer seeking asylum from sonlessness, what was he seeking asylum from? Well, we don't know and apparently we shouldn't care, because he is now married to his girlfriend, the mother of little Kevin whose skull he broke with his cultural practices. And there now seems to be no question of deporting him.
Why is this? Well, in part, because Ciprian Mircescu has now become a good boy. How? Well, we learnt the answer to that at his trial - the one where Judge Desmond Hogan chose to make the good Mircescu's baseless claim to paternity of little Kevin into reality. A social worker told the court that the accused had seen the error of his ways after attending 100 case conferences.
How many case conferences? - One hundred.
One hundred? - One hundred.
I don't how much 100 case conferences cost, but are we quite sure we want to spend so much money turning every violent and illegal immigrant into a solid citizen? Because logically, if we are be so extravagant towards people who have no right to be here at all, then we should be even more generous to those who are here lawfully, but who still have to be coaxed out of indulging their traditional cultural practices - oh, you know, a spot of girl-killing here or maybe a touch of rape there. What should the ration of case conferences be for such a person who hasn't lied to the State and is here with a legal visa? Two hundred? Three hundred?
On the other hand, might not the enforced company of social workers for a hundred sessions be regarded as cruel and unusual punishment, and illegal under EU law? But what about Irishmen who behave so violently towards their children that their tiny brains bleed and their skulls crack? Are they taken on a tour of a hundred case conferences to be shown the error of their ways? Or will they answer to an entirely different code of jurisprudence? And is that the meaning of multiculturalism?
Everyone in political or social authority addressing the subject of immigration and bogus asylum-seekers can now be relied on to mumble volumes of pious doggerel about multiculturalism, and how we should all welcome it. We should not. The new Stalinism of multiculturalism turns individuals into representatives of wholly imaginary single-cultures. It robs them both of their unique individuality and the universality of our law. Far from uniting society, it divides it. It categorises people with a predictive racism: he is Romanian, therefore he batters babies.
We are inevitably becoming a multiracial society, with many hues of human culture and conduct assembling in our cities. We should certainly welcome the benefits, but also be alert to the dangers - and dangers there certainly are. Will Triad gang members among the 40,000 Chinese who have suddenly appeared in Dublin be told when they're charged with criminal offences that, because of cultural differences, they're going to get 100 case conferences with Irish social workers? Actually, quite a fearsome prospect. Bamboo shoots up the fingernails seem more humane. And more culturally Chinese.