Sir, - The design of the MRBI poll in your editions of January 24th beggars belief. That you should use it a the basis for a news story is even worse. The pollsters asked people to express a view on this statement: "We should take a more generous approach than at present to refugees and immigrants in view of our own history of emigration and our current prosperity."
There are so many hidden assumptions in this deceptively brief statement that it is difficult to unpick them all. Are the MRBI pollsters aware that there are important differences between refugees and immigrants - and indeed between legal immigrants and illegal immigrants? If they are so aware, to confuse these categories in a polling exercise is, to say the least, a poor reflection on their professionalism. If they aren't, ditto.
The confusion evident in the design of the poll is reflected only too clearly in the fact that 60 per cent of respondents believed we should be more generous to refugees and immigrants, whereas 74 per cent believed refugee numbers should be strictly limited. Taken separately or together, the findings are all but meaningless in any real sense, and certainly do not justify a seven-column headline which claims to present factual and objective evidence of social attitudes on this complex and politically sensitive topic.
In a society which is already well on the way to using the word refugee as a sort of of genteel code word for all non-white, non-Irish-born people who have somehow managed to get into the country and are generally to be viewed with suspicion, or worse, this devaluation of language bodes ill for an intelligent discussion of the issues involved. - Yours, etc., John Horgan,
School of Communications, Dublin City University, Dublin 9.