Five years ago Taoiseach Bertie Ahern went on a State visit to Australia. While he was there he remarked on how impressed he had been with the Australian system of dealing with asylum seekers. "I am conscious," he said, "that the Australian system is probably the best in the world in dealing with immigration," writes Fintan O'Toole.
He complained of the difficulty of finding accommodation for all the asylum seekers arriving in Ireland: "We have enough accommodation for the summer, but if you follow the system here, you see how you could manage the numbers. It is all food for thought."
The Australian system consists of a series of large detention centres in which asylum seekers, including children, are incarcerated, sometimes for as long as six years, while their cases are being processed.
When these remarks were reported back home, they caused widespread consternation. In a prize Bertie-ism, the Taoiseach then implied that he had uttered them only because the Australian prime minister, John Howard, was beside him at the time and sure, God help us, you couldn't say anything that might hurt the poor man's feelings. Divil a word of it did he really mean. Yet what had actually happened was that the Taoiseach had flown a kite to test the direction of the prevailing winds.
If a few heads with no obvious froth on their mouths had popped up to suggest that locking up asylum seekers was actually a good idea, the Government might well have done so. And from a certain perspective, the Government would have been right.
If you want to stop people from seeking asylum and to be able to deport those who do without too much fuss, the Australian system is the way to go. It has almost certainly acted as a deterrent, since people fleeing persecution don't generally wish to be detained without trial, potentially - as the Australian courts have ruled - for life. Just as effectively, it seals asylum seekers off from the local community.
It ensures that they remain as numbers, as a "problem", and do not become people. And so long as asylum seekers remain as non-people, only a liberal, busybody minority, obsessed with issues such as justice and human rights, will feel bad if they are mistreated. Such a system increases the amount of suffering inflicted on them, but, paradoxically, decreases the amount of indignation felt on their behalf. This, presumably, was what was on Bertie Ahern's mind five years ago when he spoke so enviously of his admiration for the Australian system.
And if he had steeled himself back then, he just might have been able to introduce a version of it here. There would have been concerted outrage, to be sure. But the asylum system was so chaotic back then, and it was creating so many tensions, that there would have been real support too. Detention camps could have been dressed up as a "temporary" solution to the accommodation crisis. Over time the effect of vacuum-packing the asylum seekers would have been felt. Cut off from the community, they would have remained "them" - a faceless collective phenomenon, unknown and therefore frightening.
The mistake, though, is always to let people meet. Stereotypes can't abide too much human reality. By failing to lock up the asylum seekers, the State let the virus of fellow-feeling out into the general population, and it has proved to be remarkably contagious. The infection of common decency spread so rapidly that it has raged out of control. You catch it by contact - the carrier is the kid in your class, the woman on the checkout in the supermarket, the guy on your soccer team. The symptoms are that "they" cease to be "them". They become Chidinima and Sergei, Dumitra and Olukunle.
In the words of the late James Simmons: "That man's not hollow, he's a mate of mine."
This mechanism isn't a panacea. What happens, for example, to the asylum seeker who is too reticent, or too linguistically restricted, to make friends, who is irreligious and thus doesn't join a church-based community, who isn't a high flyer at school, who lacks charm? But it is powerful nonetheless. Irish culture has long been characterised by its odd double focus.
When it comes to generalities, we can be self- righteous, narrow-minded prigs. Yet, when it comes to the particular, the same people who spout those generalities can be compassionate, generous and wonderfully accepting.
We've always had our fanatics, but they have been less characteristic than the person who would, for example, vote to ban all abortion ever and yet help the neighbour's daughter get to England to sort out her crisis pregnancy.
If this is actually a rather conservative reaction, there is a nice irony in the way the influx of strangers who were supposed to threaten our traditional values have actually revivified them. What's been marvellous is the way words that were so often used to exclude - family, community, decency - have been wielded in the campaigns against the deportations as weapons of genuine solidarity. And the way that it has taken the removal of foreigners from our midst to make us, for once justifiably, proud to be Irish.