The issue of multi-culturalism and Irish identity evokes a very wide range of reactions and also, I think, a good deal of confusion in the minds of many people.
Following the unparalleled immigration flow of the past decade we are very far from arriving at a consensus at where we may, or should, end up in relation to this matter.
First of all, we should be clear on how we have come to be where we are in terms of the increasingly mixed ethnic composition of our population, which is quite simply a consequence of our rapid economic growth in the period after 1993 - the combined tempo and duration of which have had no precedent in the history of our continent.
For the first seven years or so of that unprecedented boom we were able to cater for this increase in output with our own domestic labour supply. That we could do so was due to a happy coincidence between this exceptional increase in the demand for Irish labour and a temporary peaking in our domestic labour supply - without which the Celtic Tiger could never have happened.
For that increase our domestic labour supply was able to draw simultaneously on all four potential sources of employment: the unemployed; former emigrants returning to take up jobs here (who have constituted some 40 per cent of our immigrants); a temporary exceptional flow of women into the workforce; and an enlarged inflow from the education system - an important source of labour that in the 1990s benefited from the birth rate having risen sharply two decades earlier.
But in the early part of the present decade all four of these domestic sources of labour supply simultaneously started to dry up. Even with the virtual halving of our growth rate after 2000, from 8.5 per cent a year to barely 4.5 per cent since that year, we have since been unable to supply from domestic sources the full employment needs of our economy.
Consequently we became dependent on an exceptional inflow of immigrant workers of which, since the enlargement of the EU almost four years ago, the countries in north-eastern Europe have been able to provide the greater part.
Although many of these immigrant workers from northeastern Europe - probably over half - have already returned home after a fairly brief stay, more than 200,000 others remain in employment here, contributing significantly to our economy. As jobs are lost in the period ahead, some of these will also, no doubt, return home.
Meanwhile, after 1999 an influx of asylum seekers, mainly from Africa, had also emerged, due to a combination of our new prosperity and the inadequacy of our immigration controls at that period.
This annual inflow peaked at about 11,000 in 2001, and has since declined to about 4,000. But because of the slow response of our government system to the administrative demands of this new inflow, there remain here some tens of thousands of asylum seekers who, not having been processed administratively within a reasonable period after their arrival, cannot now reasonably be deported and will accordingly have to be accom- modated within our society until and unless political conditions in their own countries may permit them to return home in safety.
These two quite distinct groups of immigrants, together with some tens of thousands of Asians, many of them now working in the retail or catering sectors, as well as smaller numbers of British, western Euro-pean and American immigrants and also of course our returned emigrants are enriching our previously somewhat inbred society.
But their presence here in such variety and in such numbers poses issues as to how far these "New Irish" should be expected to fit into our culture, and how far we, for our part, may need to modify some of our traditional attitudes in order to accommodate them.
There has hitherto been a notable reluctance to address this issue. This carries with it a danger of allowing tensions to emerge that could be avoided if we set about discussing these matters openly with representatives of the principal groups of immigrants.
The issues that need to be addressed include such matters as helping those concerned to become better integrated into our society by assisting the adult members of these groups to acquire a command of English that will enable them to improve their earning power.
At the same time we in turn need to ensure that our complex and divided educational system is adjusted so as to accommodate their children in schools with immigrants in such proportions as to enable them to become integrated into our society, rather than ghettoised and thus marginalised.
Last September I had occasion to raise both of these issues in this column. If something has since been done by the Government to address these two issues, the public have yet to be told about it. And in the absence of any such public information, there must be ground for concern on both counts. These are therefore matters to which I shall return in due course.
But another, perhaps even more sensitive, issue arises out of the situation in which we now find ourselves. This is the question of how far we may need to adjust our own way of life in order to accommodate these different groups with their very different cultural, including religious, backgrounds.
It is clearly important that we encourage and assist immigrants to maintain aspects of their distinctive cultures that they value, and that could also add to the variety of our lives. But there is now also considerable pressure that we drop aspects of our inherited culture that may not be shared by various groups of immigrants. And in my view that is quite another matter.
Already there are other domestic pressures from various politically correct sources to forget parts of our history and culture. In the past we were urged by extreme nationalists to wipe out any memory of our past as a part of the United Kingdom - for example by blowing up royal or other colonial statues and dropping the appellation "royal" from the names of some of our institutions that have survived the political division of our island.
I have always rejected, and re-sented, these populist attempts to deprive this and future generations of anything that would remind them of the fact that our ancestors - in my case, my parents - had to struggle to secure the independence of our Irish state. Such vestiges of our past can also, paradoxically, help us to maintain a link with our Northern unionist fellow countrymen.
Then there are those secularists who want to go beyond a very proper concern to ensure the religious neutrality of our State by seeking also to eliminate any vestige of the Christian origins of our native culture. Some of these are latching on to our non-Christian immigrants to push their agenda, but I very much doubt that they will get much support from Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist immigrants, who are more concerned that we should respect their cultures than that we should cease to celebrate our own.
These are the kind of issues that we need to discuss with those who have come to live among us, so as to create a society in which in the future we can all live comfortably together.