Just how difficult is it for Wahabbi terrorists to set up base in Ireland? Not in the least. After they'd finished at their government-sponsored training camp in Saudi, they could cheerfully arrive here claiming that they were seeking asylum from oppression. And we know already that the country's newspapers - including this one - and RTÉ dutifully and obligingly go along with the fiction that anyone who claims asylum is by definition an asylum-seeker.
The term "illegal immigrant" has almost vanished from the vocabulary of the media classes. Instead, any immigrant who wants to bypass the rules need only claim to be an "asylum seeker", and will immediately win the concern of the Credulously Compassionate Classes.
The recent Irish Refugee Council report condemning the conduct of "asylum-seekers'" appeals is a minor masterpiece of 3C hopefulness over bitter human experience. Though we are confronted by an industry of human trafficking, illegal immigration and international terrorist infiltration, 3C is sustained by a wondrous Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm decency: the world is good, people are good, third-world people are even better. But what's bad? Exclusion, that's bad.
So, the IRC report felt that some asylum tribunal members seemed preoccupied with how the applicants for asylum got here, and with why they chose Ireland. But those are the very questions that tribunal members must not stop asking, first, foremost and finally; otherwise, they might as well pop into an angling shop, buy themselves a few worms, and spend their time more usefully fishing for mackerel.
We have uncountable numbers of Nigerians in Ireland. Their native country has two main natural resources: oil and fraud. A sizeable number of its departing sons and daughters have taken the various skills acquired at home with them into exile; and an increasingly popular home of choice for Nigerians is Ireland.
So is it wrong to ask why they came here? Or how they came here? Asylum by definition is a place of sanctuary, a refuge for the oppressed. No doubt we are to believe that the desperate Nigerians arrived on balsa-wood boats which they tied together with rattan, and on which they set sail from Lagos harbour. Perhaps they simply trusted on a fair wind to bear them to safety, and in due course they miraculously found landfall in Ireland.
But what's so very wrong about the appeals board asking to see the balsa-wood raft? Or wondering how the applicants managed to miss 20 countries in Africa and Europe before they miraculously happened upon the country which has one of the most benignly inept immigration policies in Europe? Or, by an equally profound miracle, if our guests admit that they actually chose to come here, is the tribunal so very wrong in really wanting to know precisely why?
The 3C constituency has from the outset usually suggested that a crackdown on "asylum-seekers" is a surrogate expression of an otherwise inexpressible racism. But it is not racist to ensure that you do not wish to share your home with people who have insinuated their way under your roof with lies, and who then intend to help themselves to the contents of the fridge.
Brian Lenihan told the Dáil earlier this year that 90 per cent of "asylum-seekers" - and this is just about the only place where you'll see inverted commas around that largely fictional term - were not genuine. Since processing asylum claims costs a ludicrous €340 million a year, we know how much the false claims are costing us - €306 million a year, or well over €1 million per working day.
This is truly, truly laughable; for the 3C constituency which becomes so indignant at the "plight" of "asylum-seekers" gets comparably angry only at the plight of patients lying on trolleys on hospital corridors.
To be sure, we know the State squanders money in many directions, and it is perhaps tendentious to link densely inhabited hospital corridors with dense throngs of foreigners cheating their way into the witless benignities of our welfare system. But what the hell - if I don't, who else will? And at this point I know I have to say I'm not anti-foreigner - which is easy: I'm not - and that
I'm not anti-
multiculturalism, which I most certainly am. Ideological multiculturalism is a vile thing: it is the racist refuge of the tribalist who thinks individuals can represent only one set of intact cultural values. But the world doesn't consist of cultural firewalls; and though he doesn't realise it, the Dublin GAA fan who supports Manchester United, who listens to Puff Daddy and The Cranberries is the quintessence of multiculturalism.
It is imbecilic to think that the numbers of foreigners pouring into this country will not soon become a major source of social unrest. With 40 per cent or more of children born in our east-coast maternity hospitals being the offspring of immigrants, many of whom arrived here solely to avail of our ludicrously generous obstetric services, major demographic and social upheavals are staring us in the face.
We have no choice but to turn all illegal immigrants around at the point of entry (pregnant ones especially); and to deport those already resident so that the many law-abiding, tax-paying immigrants can remain on, without being overwhelmed by bogus asylum-seekers. For the legals, more than anyone else, will be the long-term victims of weak, preachy 3C immigration policy.
And as for Al-Qaeda, of course they're here. That's them shrieking with laughter at the security measures in Dublin airport: passport-holders this way, please, non-passport holders straight on through.