Peter O'Mahony responds to the Minister for Justice's remarks about 'cock and bull' stories of asylum seekers.
Ireland's asylum "debate" went through a significant phase earlier this year. The unjust deportation of a Nigerian youth just months before his Leaving Certificate led to a public outcry. As a consequence the deported student was allowed return to Ireland.
At the same time communities in places such as Athlone and Monaghan, which had worked hard to facilitate the integration of women and children who had sought refuge some years earlier in their midst, protested when some of these women and children were told they were to be deported.
Ireland - alone in the EU with Denmark - prevents all asylum seekers from taking up paid employment and there are some who are legally resident in Ireland and now in their sixth year of forced unemployment, at huge cost to both the State and themselves.
Opinion polls have showed strong support for asylum seekers to be allowed to work. However, the provocative comments by the Minister for Justice, when he described many asylum seekers' tales as "cock and bull stories", may have dampened this newly expressed public support for people now seen by many not as asylum seekers but as schoolmates, neighbours and friends.
The highlighting of the undeniable fact that, to their shame, some asylum seekers abuse the system ignored those who are themselves abused by the system through, for example, unfair adjudication of their cases.
The Minister has said he would prefer to turn newly arrived asylum seekers back on their arrival in Ireland were he not constrained by UN conventions.
However, he sidestepped the fact that for every five people who were able to lodge an asylum application in Ireland in the first three months of this year another four immigrants, including an unquantified number of asylum seekers, were refused entry in the same period.
No offer of a long overdue commitment to transparency, such as the publication of asylum decisions or the setting up of the Refugee Advisory Board, first promised in 1996, accompanied Mr McDowell's challenge to "political correctness".
Nor was there any echo of his pre-ministerial comments about "the indignity and contempt with which the Irish State was treating these families" - referring to a particular group of asylum seekers - or that "black and coloured people are treated differently by our immigration service".
Large-scale immigration is now a permanent reality for Ireland. The number of migrant workers who arrived in Ireland since May 2004 is higher than the total number of asylum seekers since the foundation of the State.
Asylum seekers, too, will remain a part of our day-to-day reality for the long term though, having peaked some years ago, the numbers seeking asylum here last year were less than half the total in countries such as, for example, Cyprus or Slovakia.
Though politicians do stand to gain some votes in taking anti-immigrant and, particularly, anti-asylum seeker positions, as TD Noel O'Flynn showed in the lead up to the last general election, most Irish people must surely have realised that there is little to be gained from stereotyping entire communities because of the behaviour of bad apples in their midst.
Rather the challenge is to have a system that treats all fairly and with dignity, even if some are ultimately to be refused the right to settle here and are deported.
Political leadership has a right and a duty to show up abuse where it exists and to put in place a system that separates those who need protection from those who don't.
However, the same leadership has an equal responsibility to ensure fairness.
The recent one-sided intervention of Mr McDowell and the muted response of his political colleagues suggests that we remain a long way from seeing official Ireland live up to its responsibilities.
"'Integrity of the asylum system" is regularly interpreted simply as ensuring that deportations go ahead no matter what.
The decision over whether someone be deported or will join that tiny group given "leave to remain" rests directly with the Minister for Justice - last year an astonishing eight asylum seekers were deported for every one who got "leave to remain".
Even were Ireland to receive no further asylum seekers or to see a fall-off in the numbers of migrant workers and overseas students, the integration of recent immigrants of all types has set us a challenge. To meet this manageable challenge, the plans and words of Government must now put integration centre stage.
Recent events show that immigrants themselves, whether here for asylum, work or study reasons, and local communities are prepared to play their important part.
The Minister for Justice is central to ensuring that Ireland's new communities become integrated contributors to Irish society and the Irish economy, rather than marginalised groups of people defined as different.
It would help if he exchanged his recent one-sided and partial intervention for a newly balanced approach.
Peter O'Mahony is chief executive of the Irish Refugee Council