Europe’s migrant crisis: Targets must be far more ambitious

WHILE our attention was briefly diverted the world moved on apace taking little enough notice of our political excitements. It has been reported that the death of Frank Kelly — Fr Jack, late of Craggy Island parish — got more coverage in British media than the great, by our standrds anyway, election upheavals so animating our public discourse. A sobering reality check about our place in the world indeed.

Another sobering reality was the discovery of nine Kurdish refugees in a refrigerated container offloaded from a ferry in Rosslare last Saturday. Gardaí tracked the container to New Ross and may have averted a disaster. The message is that even though we are at the very end of the Europe’s exodus routes we will have to put, sooner or later, a realistic response to the crisis in place. As that crisis escalates it is hard to describe Irish proposals to home a few thousand migrants over several years as adequate. Despite our shameful housing crisis and well-founded fears around assimilation more ambitious targets would better reflect the ambitions for a more caring society articulated at the ballot boxes last week.

As those unfortunate refugees were discovered German chancellor Anglea Merkel was preparing for an hour-long television grilling during which she steadfastly defended her open-door policy. Dr Merkel, whose 10 years at the head of German politics comes to an end this year, admitted that the stakes had never been higher for Europe or for her party. Germany accepted more than a million asylum seekers last year and it is expected that another million will reach that country this year. She stressed how very difficult it is to find common ground “because many in the EU have yet to realise just what the continent faces: a new age of globalised flight where Islamic State violence and a Syrian civil war can wash millions of people from our TV screens onto our doorsteps”.