"It doesn't do for an aid worker to be seen crying. That's why I wear dark glasses, even when it's raining. You can weep behind dark glasses and nobody sees."
The speaker was a young Irish woman working in a refugee camp on the Macedonian border. She was talking to Michael Heney, whose programme on the plight of the Kosovo Albanians was shown on Prime Time on Tuesday night.
Heney himself was distressed by what he had seen. He admitted, with gruff honesty, he had found it very difficult to maintain a professional journalistic objectivity in the making of the programme.
This is to his credit and his report was all the stronger for his anger. It was also very timely. There have lately been signs of compassion fatigue with the refugees in the media. I heard one journalist last week explaining, on radio, that the appetite back home at his editorial base had shifted from accounts of ethnic cleansing and the disappearance of young men, to stories of rape, preferably gang rape, of women.
Last Tuesday Heney reminded us, almost unbearably, of the depths of human misery in the camps. It wasn't so much the horror stories, though these were truly shocking, as the scale of the physical and emotional devastation. Exhausted women and children lying under plastic sheeting as the inexorable rain beat down; families reunited and then separated again because one or other had not got the right papers; old men looking vacantly into the distance.
Underlying the whole programme was the larger question: "What is to happen to these people?" They want to go home and Tony Blair, among others, has pledged this will happen. Michael Heney asked a spokesman for the Macedonian government what he thinks will happen. He batted the question straight back: "Do you think they will go home?"
The lessons of the recent past do not point to such a happy ending. In l992, hundreds of thousands of Bosnians fled to the West, 350,000 to Germany alone. Only a small number has returned. In 1995 several hundred thousand Serbs were forced out of Croatia. The majority have not gone back.
In this latest exodus, half of Kosovo's population of 1.8 million ethnic Albanians has already fled. Hundreds of thousands more are described as "dislocated" within Kosovo. Their homes have been burned out. Family members have disappeared.
For these people to be able to return home would require a commitment to a ground war, followed by peacekeeping forces and economic aid on a scale which the Western political community does not want to contemplate.
The harsh truth is that many, many thousands will never return, except perhaps as tourists years from now. Yet the pressure on Albania and, even more, Macedonia is already intolerable. Aid workers, even visiting celebrities like the movie star Richard Gere, recognise this but can do little beyond urging the rest of us to behave more generously.
Only Germany has begun to rise to the challenge by announcing it is prepared to double its intake of refugees from l0,000 to 20,000. But the pleas of Otto Schily, the German Interior Minister, to other EU countries to face up to their - our - responsibilities have fallen on stony ground.
No wonder the former chancellor, Helmut Kohl, has been moved to express his disgust that this is happening at a time when Europe is more prosperous than it has ever been.
Where does Ireland stand on this crisis, which resonates with so many echoes of our own history as a nation of emigrants? As I write, we do not even figure in the tally, updated daily, on the UNHCR website which shows how many refugees have been taken by various countries.
The Government has volunteered to take 1,000 Kosovans and Liz O'Donnell, the compassionate face of Ireland on this issue, has said we will respond generously to further demands.
I've been told the reason for the delay in accepting the first group of 130 is because those responsible for organising the arrival of these Programme (i.e., authorised) Refugees do not want to repeat the mistakes of the past.
A considerable effort has been put into finding suitable accommodation where groups of up to 100 can be housed, large enough to allow for a sense of community, but giving privacy to families. Arrangements are being made for language lessons, a network of local social contacts, health and education facilities. Unlike individual asylum-seekers, these new arrivals will be allowed to work.
All this is to be welcomed as evidence of a serious commitment to integrating the refugees. But this is a crisis where speed is of the essence and Ireland's response, both in terms of numbers and our delay in bringing the first group to this State, are pitifully inadequate.
Many Irish people now look back to our refusal to accept refugees from the Holocaust as a stain on our history. But at least we had the excuse at that time that we were a poor State and that our own people were being forced into exile to survive.
Besides, we have pleaded since, we did not know what was going on. We can't say that now as the suffering of thousands of Kosovan families is shown to us every night on television - in the enviable comfort of our own homes. This is not simply a moral issue (though it presents us with a serious moral challenge). Our European neighbours notice, and will remember, our record on this issue. For the moment, the anger of countries like Germany has been directed at Britain for its miserly response to the crisis. As a result, Tony Blair has agreed to a dramatic rise in the number of refugees arriving in Britain to 1,000 a week.
But we should also note the exasperated comment of a senior German politician, which was published in this newspaper yesterday. "Ireland can't stay outside NATO, so that its defence costs are practically zero, while it receives more from the EU than anybody else, and not ask if it should not be doing more here."
We know, from the example of other countries, what can be done. Norway, with a population roughly similar to our own, lies fourth in the UNHCR's tally of states which have accepted refugees. It has already taken in more than 2,000 people and pledged itself to accept 6,000.
There is an enormous fund of goodwill in Ireland for the plight of the Kosovan refugees. We know that from the sums donated to aid agencies and to church collections, particularly in poorer parishes. We have an opportunity now to translate that generosity and compassion into a larger act. It might even help us to stop seeing other asylum-seekers as a threat and to start offering them a warmer welcome.