Sir, - Eanna Dowling (August 8th) deals with the issues of globalisation and immigration, and how they affect this country, through a mixture of half-baked economic theory and earnest self-delusion that has become wearily familiar to anyone who is a regular reader of your Letters page.
He identifies globalisation as some sort of sinister, hegemonic master plan hatched by us in the West to bleed the developing nations dry of their resources.
This latest variation of the classic Leftist critique of global economics ignores completely, as usual, what the people of poorer countries themselves might actually think.
Under the prescriptive diktats of theorists such as Mr Dowling, the choice between gainful employment and a life of pre-industrial purity is a choice these people are, one suspects, not intellectually equipped to make.
Workers in Vietnamese sportswear factories would be liberated from the clutches of foreign capital and returned to the bucolic simplicity and grinding poverty of no work at all.
To further claim that millions of people have been displaced as a result of globalisation and made refugees by our Western addiction to luxury beggars credulity and borders on the nonsensical. The more prosaic truth is that borne out by the vast history of humanity - migration is gravitation toward wealth.
For decades in this country ordinary people laboured hard for little return. Now it seems that when we finally get to enjoy some of the fruits of generations of toil and self-sacrifice, we are hectored almost daily by the newest occupiers of the moral high ground about how greedy we have become. We wallow in material wealth, insensible to the sufferings of others.
It is this uniquely white, liberal, moneyed-class guilt that informs much of what passes for our thinking on the issue of immigration in Ireland today. Mr Dowling's letter is a textbook example of this. Duty bound to welcome the distant victims of our prosperity, the Irish are described as a multicultural, multi-ethnic people. In recent years it has become popular to promote this fallacy of an Irish identity that owes more to well-intentioned, wishful thinking than fact.
The uncomfortable truth is that the Irish are a remarkably homogenous race, sharing a uniformity of culture, religion, traditions and language for at least the past thousand years. Reinventing ourselves in such a specious manner to better fit the agendas of a small but very vocal multiculturalist lobby will achieve nothing. Legislating and lecturing recalcitrant natives into putting aside genuine fears and concerns about an influx of foreigners into a little island the Irish have lived in and fought to live in for centuries can only deepen prejudice and mistrust.
The loudest calls for an open-door immigration policy have come from those resident in the leafier suburbs and more secluded corners of our country.
The people who are having to live along the fault-lines of this brave new multi-racial Ireland, those dwelling in our inner cities and at less fashionable suburban addresses, have not been asked what they think.
They are the sort of people, one presumes, who don't write letters to The Irish Times. - Yours, etc.,
Philip Donnelly, Newtown Court, Maynooth, Co Kildare.