There are many reasons to deplore racism as a phenomenon, but the greatest of all is this: the mere suspicion that racism exists enables the most loud-mouthed and sanctimonious undergraduate in our midst to describe any restrictive policy towards immigrants, asylum-seekers and refugees as being racist. No discussion, no exchange of views, no attempt to find and enjoy a shared wisdom survives this accusation. Instead, another issue - the racism, and thus the evil, of the accused person - bulldozes all other subject matter out of the way.
It is a contemptible, cowardly and intellectually slothful way of examining any complex issue; but of course, it unfailingly achieves what it sets out to achieve - the establishment of the moral superiority of the accuser. For the insidious logic runs like this: anyone who accuses anyone else of being racist is clearly anti-racist, and therefore a good person, and certainly a better person than the accused. The accusation in itself convicts the accused and vindicates the accuser.
McCarthyite purges
We have seen this kind of thing before - in the trials of witches, in the persecution of heretics, in the McCarthyite purges of the 1950s. The accusation is the conviction. It is grim, tawdry stuff, and to see such self-puffing, holier-than-thou cant in observations about immigration into Ireland today, as we have done recently in this newspaper, is simply nauseating.
For we know the cerebral vapidity, the trite superciliousness, of the professional anti-racism lobby is highly selective, not merely in Ireland, but across the world. Thus the dismal charade in Durban, where Israel alone is being singled out for attention as a racist state. This is such an absurdity, such a contradiction of the living, breathing truth, that one is almost lost for words, as one would be if one had to rebut the accusation that Saudi Arabia is too tolerant of public lesbianism.
Two minutes in any Israeli street will tell you of the racial complexity of the modern Jewish state; and any doubts about how broadly Israel defines Jewishness were rebutted by the vast airlift of the coal-black Falashas from Ethiopia 20 years ago.
I make no judgment here upon the appalling violence which has taken so many lives in the region recently; but I am absolutely sure that no Israeli government has ever broadcast anything to compare with the virulently genocidal and anti-Semitic filth emanating from its neighbours.
Yet Israel is being singled out at Durban as an intrinsically racist state, though it is clearly not, while there is state racism right across the world, especially in Africa, Arabia and Asia. Who would be a white farmer in Zimbabwe or a Filipino immigrant worker in Saudi? Who would be a Harijan in India, despite the criminalisation of all restrictions against "untouchables" in 1949? Who would be a member of the similarly despised Burakamin in Japan? Instead, racism and slavery have been defined as white man's crimes, especially of the great European imperial powers.
Supporting slavery
The Irish thereby escape the broad brushstrokes of genocide, as if Irish people did not participate in the genocide of the Plains Indians or support slavery in the US, did not serve on slavers standing out of Liverpool, did not wipe out the indigenous Beothuk people of Newfoundland - and did not once upon a time enslave a young shepherd named Patrick.
There is no reason today for Irish people, or Germans, to apologise for what their ancestors did. Nothing is attained by such meaningless expressions, except the debasement of language; and debasement of language is central to the braggadocio of professional anti-racists. They fill their arguments with weasel "anti-racist" terms that enter any discourse about immigration like a lethal virus, transforming it in something else entirely.
We have come to a great turning point in Irish life, the second - after the Whitaker economic reformation - since independence. We are becoming a multi-racial society. Major and irreversible changes are under way; and we have the right to discuss these changes, how we manage them and control them and how many Africans, Asians and non-EU Europeans we take in, without our own native, blustering clowns frothing at the mouth and accusing us of racism for doing so. It is not racist to have immigration policies or immigration quotas. Neither is it wrong or racist to deport those who have illegally arrived here. It is realistic, as every country in the world acknowledges in practice.
Not possible
Nor is it wrong or racist to set limits upon the numbers of people we can give asylum to. Most of Africa is a heaving calamity - and that which is not is waiting to be. It is simply not possible for us to give sanctuary to everyone who needs it, and only sanctimonious - or morally dishonest - fools declare otherwise. For the most part, it is pious braggarts - probably from the sanctuary of their leafily secluded million-pound homes - who throw the "racist" allegation at those who wish to be realistic about this hideously complicated issue.
There has been racism in Ireland, and there will be racism in Ireland, and it is always a vile and noxious thing. But it will be made far more vile and noxious if any reasoned discussion about immigration is stymied by self-serving proclamations about "racism" from the posturing buffoons of the professional anti-racist brigade. Much painful honesty is needed if we are to create a coherent, civilised immigration policy. We should not be bullied by humbug.