To the shame-inducing gallery of Celtic Tiger Ireland - teeming litter, homeless children - a new image is shortly to be added: that of handcuffed immigrants being bundled on to planes and taken away from this State.
Deportation is the next big stick the Minister for Justice is about to wave at the unwanted thousands of asylum-seekers who came here in recent years. And with the measures announced by Mr O'Donoghue this week, it is clear the Department of Justice wants the mass expulsion of rejected asylum-seekers to start as soon as possible.
In fact, two of the elements Mr O'Donoghue has unveiled - restrictions on applicants' right to seek judicial reviews and his promise, yet again, that asylum cases would be dealt with within six months - are old news. However, the creation of a Garda immigration bureau with powers to detain asylum-seekers marks a new phase for the Department. Instead of just talking tough, it is now going to act tough.
To stem the inflow of immigrants, the Department has issued orders, signed international conventions, passed legislation and imposed new border controls. Little of it seems to have worked, and the numbers applying for asylum have continued to rise.
The Department now wants to tackle the problem from the other end, by ejecting as many as possible of the 4,000 or so people whose asylum applications have been rejected.
The obvious question that comes to mind is why this hasn't happened earlier. Deportation is an essential part of the asylum process. Otherwise, the process becomes meaningless, with no distinction being made between those who merit a place of refuge and those who don't.
Yet by the end of March, of 300 deportation orders issued - itself only a fraction of the total facing expulsion - only 19 had been implemented.
The Minister's response is to attribute this to a lack of Garda powers and delays caused by judicial reviews in the courts. But this is only part of the story, even if you pass over the fact that the Department's botched attempts to make and implement legislation largely accounts for its current problems.
It is, after all, almost three years since the Dublin Convention came into force in EU states. This was supposed to solve Ireland's refugee "problem" by allowing us to return would-be asylum-seekers arriving from other EU states. Applications would have to be dealt with in the first EU state they set foot in. Since Ireland has hardly any direct transport links with developing countries, we would be off the hook. Only it didn't work like that.
The fine-print of implementing the deal was missing and so too, it seems, was the willingness on the part of the authorities in France and elsewhere. While Department officials are quick to blame asylum-seekers for not carrying identification documents, they are ignoring the fact that the Department has failed to process many applications within the time limits specified under the convention.
Furthermore, a comparative study of EU procedures, commissioned by the Department itself, pointed out last year that the convention had been incorrectly implemented in Irish regulations.
Deportation begs another question. Where are some deportees to be sent? What prospect is there of sending home a rejected Somali or Algerian, even if the State could stomach doing such a thing? What Irish pilot is going to land his plane on the runway at Mogadishu, if there still is a runway?
It is, however, ironic that Mr O'Donoghue should be coming under such fire around the State for his dispersion policy at this time. The Government is, after all, finally putting together a semblance of an asylum policy. The old emphasis on policing the newcomers is still there, but so also are long-overdue commitments on accommodating asylum-seekers, providing a dedicated asylum agency and developing anti-racism and integration policies.
Dispersal isn't only necessary - because of the shortage of accommodation in Dublin - it is also just. Most of our EU neighbours already practise such a policy; in Germany, for example, every parish gets its share of asylum-seekers, with population the only criterion.
The Minister has to ensure that asylum-seekers are spread out in order to avoid the creation of ghettos; however, he also has a duty to see that the numbers in any one area are not so small as to cause unnecessary hardship or isolation for the people concerned.
Some local communities have rightly complained of a lack of consultation - when were the asylum-seekers ever consulted? - but there is a certain disingenuousness to some of the "if only you had told us first" arguments, especially when 500 people turn out for a protest meeting in a community where the population is supposed to be 400.
What has been termed an asylum-seeker crisis boils down to extraordinary numbers of Romanians and Nigerians coming to Ireland. Even in 1998, Ireland was already receiving three times the number of both nationalities compared to Germany, traditionally the main country of refuge in Europe, and the figures have become even more skewed since.
The Minister has constantly opposed an amnesty for asylum-seekers already here, arguing that this would send out the wrong message about Ireland and thereby attract a fresh wave of immigration. Common sense would seem to bear his argument out; when the Government granted a limited right to work to some asylum-seekers in 1998, there was a consequent jump in asylum applications in the succeeding months.
A better solution might be to grant humanitarian leave to remain to many asylum-seekers whose cases have been delayed a considerable time. As the Catholic bishops pointed out last month, this option has been exercised more restrictively in Ireland than in many other EU states.
Overall, the Minister's efforts might inspire more trust if they weren't so one-sided. His Department has done all it can to hold on to the reins as tightly as possible. Thus, the new asylum agency will be under the remit of the Department. The Refugee Agency dealing with programme refugees from Bosnia, Kosovo, etc., is to move from the purlieu of the Department of Foreign Affairs to the Department of Justice. Finally, the new refugee applications commissioner is to come from within the Department of Justice.
With all that influence, how much more power does the Minister need?
Paul Cullen's book, Refugees and Asylum-Seekers in Ireland, was published last week by Cork University Press; price £6.95.