In a matter of weeks the deportations will begin. A new Garda unit is being established to deal with the task. Police liaison officers from Romania, and possibly from other countries, will be posted to Ireland to work alongside the Garda in implementing the decisions as to who stays and who gets sent back.
It will all be done in a civilised way. There is a functioning system of due process - albeit belatedly. There is adequate food, shelter and basic necessities. When the deportations start they will be discreet. There will be no manacled families standing in line with other travellers at the check-in gates at the airports. Everything will be done according to the international rule book.
But the rule book does not say anything about taking children out of the only schools or homes they know, having arrived here as infants. It does not say anything about taking children from the country or the district in which they have come to awareness. It does not say anything about sundering close relationships and supportive friendships between immigrants and people they have met in Ireland. These are not matters which can be part of the calculus when the deportations start. So when the Roma gypsies are cleared away from the traffic lights and when the Nigerians are taken off the city streets, Ireland will have no case to answer before the world's lawmakers.
The only case it will have to answer will be with its own conscience and, perhaps, with the recollection of its historical experience. The Irish, whose children were sent illegally, in their tens of thousands to the United States and elsewhere, just a few short years ago, will give the law and nothing but the law to the wretched men, women and children who have made their way to our shores over the few short years since the beginning of our economic boom.
A dubious vocabulary has been adopted by the Government and the main political parties in addressing this issue. To allow these people to stay would be to "reward" those who have broken our laws. Ironic, when we recall successive Taoisigh pleading with Presidents Reagan and Bush to give amnesty to our young Irish "illegals" in the US. To give these people shelter here would be to play into the hands of unscrupulous traffickers who smuggle human cargo through our ports, it is said. Yet when Irish airlines carried tens of thousands of our young people abroad, clear in the knowledge that many of them intended to abuse other countries' immigration laws, we did nothing to prevent it. Was there ever a clearer case of "do not as I do but as I say"?
This State cannot operate an open-door policy. Much larger societies are obliged to regulate very strictly the admission of immigrants. But there is surely a case in simple humanity for allowing those who have been here for years and who have attempted to put down roots to stay on. Had they been returned immediately to whence they came, the onus of charity would not be so great. It is the failure of the State to operate a swift, efficient and just system of adjudication which has placed so many of these people in a half-settled condition, with children in schools, with relationships formed and so on.
The Catholic bishops recently urged an accommodation for such people. Only one or two individual politicians tentatively responded - none with the support of their parties. There is time for a change of direction - but only a little time. Within weeks, the Romanians, the Nigerians, the Congolese and others will be going to the airports in Garda vans and cars, returning to conditions of which little is known - and that little appears far from pleasant. There is a pragmatic argument for allowing them to stay and work in a society which is crying out for workers, skilled, unskilled and in-between. But there is a stronger argument in humanity and in the story of our own emigrant past.