Politics is full of ironies. This week the Government has been forced to undertake an unprecedented U-turn on its Budget. In fact, the U-turn is ongoing. But the issue which caused the initial outcry, the individualisation of the tax bands, seemed predicated on the need to encourage greater participation by women in the labour force.
But the same Government, under pressure to sustain the Celtic Tiger's insatiable appetite for workers, opposed for two full years giving asylum-seekers the right to work for their living. This contradiction in itself illustrates the difficulties the refugee and immigration issue is causing this Government and elements of Irish society.
Unlike most of our European neighbours, we have not had to deal with this issue before. But the reaction of many people over the past few years to what is still a relatively modest number of asylum-seekers certainly calls into question assumptions that Ireland is a society free of racism and prejudice.
Just as the McCreevy Budget generated a much-needed debate about our economic direction, I hope the shocking scenes last month outside the Refugee Applications Centre will lead to a more considered and informed debate on this issue.
The most important requirement for the debate is that it be "informed". This means correcting the mistaken belief, fed by the inflammatory comments of some TDs and the careless language of a number of Ministers, that we are in some way being "swamped" by asylum-seekers. Belgium, a country with six times as many inhabitants per square kilometre as Ireland, last year received 22,000 applications for asylum.
At present there are about 8,000 asylum-seekers here awaiting adjudication on their applications. For almost all of them the prospect of success is not good.
The State rejects well over 90 per cent of applications. Theoretically, people should then be deported, but the State has so far balked at doing so because the Irish people have expressed unease at deporting people who have been here for long periods while our authorities processed their applications.
Unfortunately, the Government has added to the difficulties by refusing permission to work to all but a tiny handful of asylum-seekers. This has forced the majority to remain on the subsistence level of social welfare and made them vulnerable to taunts of bar-room racists that they are "spongers".
In my experience the vast majority of asylum-seekers are only too willing to work and resent the fact that they are denied the opportunity to do so.
Action is required on a number of fronts. I believe we should reject the appalling prospect of forced deportations and should seek to regularise the position of asylum-seekers who are already here and wish to remain.
The truth is that many of these people are here precisely because they want work. They should be allowed to do so. But we also need an organised education and training programme to help assimilate them into Irish society.
We need to confront the spectre of racism and intolerance and mount a public education programme that would promote tolerance and understanding and fight prejudice and ignorance.
Having lived for so long with the problem of emigration, we now need to devise a policy to deal with immigration. The Government has singularly failed to do so. Its legislative initiatives have been confined to modernising the law covering deportations and immigration trafficking.
Both measures would represent important components of an overall policy, but in the absence of a fundamental set of principles they convey a distinctly hostile message.
Immigration already exists. Irish people coming home, EU citizens and those in receipt of work permits, most of whom are either American or from former British colonies, coming into this country far outnumber those leaving.
The Government is talking now about liberalising the regime in respect of work permits, again driven by the need for new workers.
But I, for one, have a deep sense of unease about a country which sent forth so many migrants to the rest of the world cherry-picking its immigrants in that fashion. Ireland is not in a position to provide a path out of economic deprivation for all those who seek it, but it is my view that we should do so for some. Ultimately, that will involve some form of quota system with eastern European and African countries.
Such a policy should enable us to plan properly both for potential immigrants and the society that is receiving them. With a humanitarian policy in place, we would be in a better moral position to deal with immigration traffickers who deal in human misery and the countries which facilitate them bringing people to this State.
In my view it will ultimately make Ireland a better place, both economically and culturally.
Brendan Howlin is deputy leader of the Labour Party