Kevin Myers says it's very tempting to say that the monstrous attack on the African Pentecostal Church pilgrims was very, ah, African: but it wasn't.
It was very Irish. This is a land where people have been killed because of their religion and race for decades. If anything, we seem to be treating our Pentecostals better than we used. Twenty years ago the INLA gunned down three brethren of the Darkley Pentecostal church in Armagh. The Bray Head Africans were merely racially abused, terrorised, and threatened with knives. That's progress, if you like.
The INLA has stayed in business all that time because enough people found it in their hearts to find tolerance for its anti-Pentecostal capers. The same with the IRA who, having massacred nine Protestants in a fish shop on the Shankill Road just 10 years ago, went on to fame, fortune, invitations to Leinster House and ultimately, government over those they had bereaved.
It's a funny old world.
I don't make light of what happened to the African Pentecostalists. It was an outrage. But it's not worse than Darkley. Nor is it worse than the murders of Norman Stronge and his son James, who were murdered by the IRA as "symbols of the hated unionism". Now I sincerely hope the assailants of our African guests are found and dealt with very severely. But what is the difference in spirit between what the IRA and the INLA did to Protestants because they were Protestant unionists and what a crowd of drunken Dublin thugs did to some blameless Africans because they were black and Pentecostalist? There is none, surely. Merely because one set of thugs has a "political agenda" doesn't make the act any different in substance or in morality.
Dislike of difference is a common feature of Irish life. Irish "liberals" notoriously do not tolerate anything they disagree with. Intolerance of diversity of opinion on the issue of immigration has essentially meant that there has been no serious debate about self-styled "asylum-seekers", illegal immigration, people-smuggling rackets and organised dole fraud. And attempts by gardaí to impose the law - such as it is - have been swiftly labelled racist, or as pandering to racist sentiment.
It is not racist to want to control the numbers of immigrants entering a country. It is not racist to say the State has a right to restrict the number of Africans coming to live here. It is not racist to say the congregation of immigrants in ghettoes is a factor in creating a racist environment. It is not racist to say that the arrival of a large number of fundamentalist Muslims into Ireland is simply not desirable. It is not racist to say that those who arrive here under the false flag of asylum-seeking should be deported.
Media comment on this issue and allied issues of "equality" has been dominated by the priggish left, aided by the imams of the Equality Authority, who by an extraordinary dereliction of duty, were allowed by the government of the day to appoint their own inspectorate, their own prosecution service, and run their own courts. For a decade or so, the equality industry enforced the rule of the politically correct through their own religious courts, in which the judges were all non-lawyers and believers.
Such nonsense will sooner or later generate nonsense, and in due course it came with the Coulton case, in which a 19-year old was refused service in an off-licence, and his family complained to the Equality Agency imams.
They ruled that he had indeed been illegally discriminated against on grounds of age, and Molloy's off-licence was fined €1,000.
The sound you hear is of a straw spiralling through the desert air just as it lands on the dromedarian spine. Crack. What could be clearer? The entire nation is in uproar about teenage drinking, yet here was a State agency fining an off-licence for being responsible on the issue. The imams had already been begging for trouble for some time before that when they came up with the farcical ruling that, in essence, Traveller children could not be barred from pubs.
There might not be much to thank this Government for; but we have this other straw to cling to, the one that didn't break the camel's back: at least Michael McDowell has ended the absurd monopoly of power enjoyed by the Equality Agency and its self-appointed fingernail-inspectors and kneecappers. After the ludicrous Coulton case, he shifted power of adjudication over complaints to the district courts, for which there might not be a great deal to say other than this: the judges have all passed a law degree or two.
And maybe that was the high tide of doctrinaire liberalism: and from now on, reason and pragmatism will be allowed to have their say. We can talk about immigration without meeting the bogus theology of egalitarianism at every turn or a pack of dogmas platitudinising at our heels.
We have no tradition of immigration; we have a deep sense of tribe; our political parties have names which in any other country would be fascist: imagine Family of Anglo-Saxons or Knights of Destiny in England. Dublin is not New York City, nor is it London, and mistakes made now cannot later be undone. We are going to be a multi-racial society. That is a certainty, and we must get it right. Ask people of all races in Bradford, Burnley, Blackburn, whether immigration was handled correctly 30 years ago. They will say no. Let's not be answering the same way to the same question in 30 years' time.