What are we? A community or an economy? asks Kevin Myers
They're not necessarily contradictory terms, but they can be. A convent is a community, a market is an economy: they have little in common. Traders don't need to get on with one another: nuns do, sort of. Communities depend upon small and voluntary kindnesses that arise from shared values, the cement of civility, common regard and duty. Traders trade and then go home to their own community.
We are steadily transforming Irish life from being primarily a large community, called a nation, with an economy attached to pay for it, to being primarily an economy with no clear sense of community. But humans need to belong to a community, with an inner cohesion as its core, with a daily expectation of small and voluntary kindnesses. And if we continue to believe that we are primarily an economy, and not a nation served by a subordinate economy, then terrible dangers lie ahead.
The economist Jim Power of Friends First says Ireland must attract 300,000 migrant workers in the next 10 years if we are to achieve our "growth potential", whatever that means. With dependants, that could be around a million people. So how are we going to cope with the consequences of such a large influx? Should we not, in the longer term, be more modest in our expectations of "growth potential", and more ambitious in the creation of social harmony?
It was the belief that Britain was primarily an economy, rather than a nation requiring cohesion, which allowed it to embark upon its insane immigration policies in the 1950s. It became "racist" to contemplate traditional British qualities as being worthy of retaining and celebrating - indeed, aided by the intolerant, self-hating liberal coteries which took over the commanding heights of British media life, to celebrate Englishness, in particular, was regarded as reactionary, imperialist and simply silly.
At the time of the Battle of Britain 65 years ago this summer there were just 77,000 "aliens" - either non-British or non-Irish - living there. No one knows how many "aliens" - an almost illegal word these days - there are in Britain today, but there are 900,000 illegal immigrants, and 350,000 failed asylum-seekers who just sort of stayed, primarily because it would have seemed "racist" to have applied the law to them and sent them packing.
These "illegals" mean that there are probably more than 2 million Muslims in Britain. If you want a snapshot of the consequences of this, take a look at Luton, two of whose sons have been killed fighting for Islamicists against coalition forces in Afghanistan. In three of its 12 secondary schools, over 90 per cent of the pupils are from ethnic minority backgrounds (EMB).
Overall, 44 per cent of pupils in Luton are from EMB (as they're called), though only 30 per cent of the population of the town is. Which means that the EMB is producing proportionately 50 per cent more children than the indigenous population - with the consequence that quite soon they will be changing places.
Moreover, Dr Nazia Khanum, the "chair" of the splendidly named Luton Multicultural Women's Coalition (no, I didn't make it up, simply because I just couldn't), actually had the nerve to complain to a Commons select committee that in many rural schools outside Luton - in deepest, darkest Bedfordshire - both teachers and pupils were almost entirely white. How perfectly shocking.
Moreover, contrary to the standard cliché that immigrants are always good for a society, barely more than 20 per cent of the town's ethnic minority are economically active. A comparable myth, repeated ad nauseam, is that people do not follow the welfare trail. No? Well, some 20,000 Somalis with Dutch passports have left the Netherlands for Britain in the past five years explicitly because they prefer the undemanding British rules. Another 4,000 Somalis from Denmark have done likewise. Several thousand of these Somalis have now crowded into a few streets in Leicester, which is about to turn its ethnic white European majority into a minority.
These immigrants and EMBs of Britain all have the right to come to Ireland - and there's no point in saying that they never will. The Somalis have shown us that people do seek out welfare opportunities across the European Union. Moreover, to judge from the splendid Dr Khanum's remarks, if they find the host country too white and too Christian, some won't be shy about saying so.
So - to preserve ourselves as a cohesive, pluralist society, capable of peacefully absorbing immigrants, as we must, are we therefore to limit immigration, and thus limit economic growth? This brings us to the next, really serious issue, which we are probably too cowardly to confront now, but will have to within a few years. In order to preserve the cohesiveness of Irish life, might we not have to derogate from EU rules on free population movement within the Union? Or do we in time allow Limerick to turn into Leicester? And are we even able to discuss this question maturely, without bawling the usual imbecilic pieties about "racism" and "multiculturalism"?
That said, I'd simply love to be a fly on the wall at the Dundalk Multicultural Women's Coalition in 2020 as an Islamicist circumciser called Fatima with a hajib and a pair of shears, a hairy lesbian hill-farmer called Ned, a Pakistani sociologist called Benezhir who thinks the people of the Cooleys are too white, Gertrude Periwinkle of the Church of Ireland's Ladies' Bowling League and Fidelma Entrails of the 32-County Sovereignty Committee all get stuck into one another over the fairy cakes.
Paradise.