First a quick quiz. How many refugees are there in Ireland? a) 3,000? b) 5,000? c) 10,000? And how much do they cost? a) £20 million? b) £50 million? c) £100 million? If you answered c) you've probably been reading too many tabloid newspapers, which have seized on these numbers, admirable for their roundness but otherwise inaccurate. Choosing b) means you've been listening to the Fianna Fail TD Ivor Callely, who regularly cites these equally inaccurate figures.
But a) isn't the right answer either. There are something over 3,000 asylum seekers here - about half the number of Irish people living in Munich. The number of recognised refugees is about one-tenth of that number.
As for the burden on the Exchequer, it is far lower than predicted by the Minister for Justice during the year, a recent answer in the Dail by the Minister for Social Welfare revealed.
The cost is about the same as the Government has bestowed on Croke Park. And about half of this goes not to the asylum seekers but to lucky - Irish - landlords making windfall profits from charging the health boards £20 a night for B&B accommodation.
Loaded, emotive language has regularly been employed to deliver these inaccurate statistics. Another Fianna Fail TD, Liam Lawlor, talked up the few thousand asylum seekers into floods of refugees during the election campaign.
The Minister who now has responsibility for overseas development and human rights, Liz O'Donnell of the PDs, claimed the refugee system was being "overwhelmed by economic migrants" - without adducing a shred of evidence.
The media has done little better. At one point, the Star ran a headline "Refugee Rapist on the Rampage". Not to be outdone, the Evening Herald put "Refugee Gang Bust" in mile-high lettering on its front page earlier this month. In both cases, evidence of refugee involvement in the alleged crimes was flimsy to non-existent.
This isn't about political correctness. Asylum-seekers commit crimes too - but no more or less than other members of society. Neither is it just about accuracy or correct labelling. The point is that ordinary people suffer when such "them and us" characterisations are drawn. People who are different.
Asylum-seekers now suffer verbal abuse on a daily basis, particularly if they are black or Romanian. Beatings and other forms of physical abuse are becoming more common. How long is it before we suffer the kind of racist attacks seen in Germany and other European states?
Not very long, if the kind of racist literature in circulation is anything to go by. Take the following example, which was handed to an African man by three young Irishmen in the Dublin suburb of Templeogue recently.
"Black men are here in Ireland now. The worthless scum of the British Empire . . . " it starts, and you know you are about to hear every racist cliche ever written. Black people are lazy; they want to out-populate us; they all look the same and share passports, etc.
This unsigned document goes on to claim that "blacks always keep five to 10 snakes in their houses, so they can drink their blood, as all blacks believe that to drink snake's blood is healthy".
Risible? Extreme? Maybe, but this was also the year in which we saw Irish immigration officers boarding Belfast-Dublin trains in search of "any black people"; in which a UK citizen, who happened to be black and travelling without identity papers, was deported from the Republic to Northern Ireland; in which countless numbers of black Irish people have been pulled aside at immigration desks and asked to justify their presence in their own country.
The experience of one such person, an 18-year-old woman whose father is Zimbabwean, was described to me by her mother earlier this year: "We had no idea this was going to happen. She was very distressed by this incident and sobbed herself to sleep saying repeatedly, `why didn't they stop any other Irish person?'."
The Department of Justice has such a reputation for cock-ups in other areas that it is almost unfair to accuse it of singling out asylum-seekers for special mistreatment. Yet the picture of thousands of people queueing for hours in the rain outside the Department was the perfect illustration of an unfeeling, slipshod bureaucracy in action. It was as though Ellis Island came to St Stephen's Green for the day. With accelerating zeal, the Department pursued its remit of controlling immigration during the year, yet there was little progress in taking asylum-seekers out of their legal limbo by processing cases.
But at least the Department could claim to be doing its job, unlike the politicians, whose lack of leadership was stunning. With very few honourable exceptions - take a bow Gay and Jim Mitchell - the best we got were righteous expressions of support for "genuine refugees" - as though politicians would dare to talk of genuine taxi-drivers, taxpayers or politicians.
If politicians have a defence, it is that they are reflecting the views of constituents. One-third of Irish people admitted in a recent poll to being racist. In Dublin the writing is literally on the wall, in the form of anti-refugee and anti-black graffiti.
It hasn't yet sunk in that being a power in the world entails obligations as well as rights. As the former minister Joan Burton says, if we want to match the Scandinavians economically we have to match them on a humanitarian level.
Yet when the Norwegians were taking in 12,000 Bosnians some years ago, Ireland accepted 200. At no point this year has anyone suggested that we allow some of the thousands of refugees languishing in camps around the world to resettle here.
We can't just have the ethnic restaurants and music, and export the rest of the problem.