John O'Donoghue will travel far on his working summer holiday this month. First, he'll go to Nigeria, the country from where, he famously remarked, you can't travel directly to Ireland unless "by balloon". Then he'll jet down to Durban, South Africa, for Mary Robinson's conference on racism - with an entourage, as befits his ministerial status and just in case he departs from his scripts on refugee and asylum-seeker policy.
Mr O'Donoghue wrote his own scripts when he was opposition spokesman on Justice, and passionate they were. Paragraphs of powerful rhetoric linked Ireland's experience of emigration and economic deprivation to the lives of contemporary refugees who were starting to reach Irish borders; heart-felt advocacy on behalf of transparency and fairness for all the dispossessed became his brand.
No doubt Mr O'Donoghue will mouth his pre-packaged words in Africa with the fire he honed in opposition. But his attitude changed. Battles with his former constituency colleague, Jackie Healy-Rae, for the hearts and minds of Kerry voters transformed Mr O'Donoghue into a self-righteous advocate for his Department's traditional policies: no "aliens" here.
This week's Supreme Court ruling means Mr O'Donoghue faces the prospect of deporting some 95 per cent of the Republic's refugee and asylum-seeking population. That amounts to about 12,500 human beings. Many have lived in Ireland for up to four years. How will he do it? Not even his political rhetoric can generate enough hot air to transport so many people to their countries of origin.
Mr O'Donoghue and his officials have quietly let it be known that their hardline tactics are deterring people from reaching Irish shores. Numbers have dropped slightly. Yet the backlog is actually higher than last year, even though substantial numbers of extra staff were employed to process applications, and more than a few promotion posts were set up for ambitious Justice officials meanwhile. The whole process is something of a mystery: more staff dealing with fewer applications would normally be expected to result in a smaller backlog, rather than the reverse.
But many of his actions are mysterious. He claims he is bringing the State into line with "internationally accepted norms". Yet when the UN High Commission on Refugees examined how various countries were managing the issue, it found Ireland's recognition rate was less than half the average.
Ireland is not operating in line with any norms. It is consistently operating well below them. Its rate of 5 per cent recognitions overall implies that the overwhelming majority of people seeking sanctuary here are "bogus", in the Minister's words. Hence the 95 per cent prospective rate of deportations, along with all the human misery it entails.
THE trend emerging is that rates drop as applications from a particular country increase. The same pattern of exclusion emerges in how refugees are accommodated, with national groupings dispersed away from each other and mixed with other refugees, whose language and culture are as alien to them as Ireland is to them all. Any sane reading must conclude that Mr O'Donoghue and his Department don't want refugee communities to develop, in the way Irish communities did in countries all over the world. That will deprive their birth countries of a diaspora's positive effects.
The smaller the community, the more vulnerable its members. Irish refugees and asylum-seekers are already marginalised because they don't have a right to work and don't have the normal rights to legal representation. They are sitting targets for any bullies who come along, including a bully state.
Mr Justice Hardiman's judgment given on behalf of the Supreme Court upholds the State's behaviour in operating what many professionals interpret as a lack of transparency in giving reasons for deportations - basically, a one-size-fits-all reply. He took pains, however, to point out that the applicants hadn't challenged the system of decision-making itself. Anyone who looked at the Refugee Council's independently commissioned report on how the system works might have considerable reservations about its fairness and consistency. The rape of a woman who had been illegally detained in prison during a conflict was determined as not in itself a politically motivated act, for example. Mr Justice Hardiman's remarks suggest he may have looked at it rather critically.
Deportation is an inevitable aspect of any State's immigration, refugee and asylum-seeking procedures - provided the procedures are themselves above board. In Nigeria, Mr O'Donoghue will negotiate a so-called resettlement agreement with officials whose colleagues have been found by the UN and Amnesty to be susceptible to bribes, and whose state is a legal morass. A raped woman can be executed under Sharia law unless she can summon a number of male witnesses to her defence, and even then may be murdered by her family because of the shame it brings. Irish refugee procedures consider such fears manifestly unfounded.
Mr O'Donoghue's empire-building has grown on the backs of refugees and asylumseekers. But when he tells the world in Durban how Ireland operates international norms, it will simply be untrue. Aer Lingus could do with the business of transporting 12,500 unwanted people. What Government Minister will have the bottle to turn up to say goodbye?
mruane@irish-times.ie