To be continued…

It’s been a strange time since Christmas. So many stories and yet so little change. And that’s all been euros. Life, daft as it is, goes on, as it does, this year as last. You can be sure of it, the years roll around.

Our first tale involves Richard Reid, the shoe terrorist. Now, there’s a way and a half to be remembered. The man who tried to set fire to explosives in his shoe and cause a mid-air explosion. And who fought like a dog against those who restrained him. After a life of petty crime, he seems to have wanted to save his sole, and with a bang at that.

His tale reminds us of the complexities of free speech, religious tolerance and the concept of asylum. Reid converted to Islam while in prison. On the outside, he attended the Brixton mosque. This is renowned as a place of tolerance and of rehabilitation for messers such as he.

But it appears that Reid came under the influence of more radical voices, despite the best efforts of people like Brixton’s Abdul Haqq Baker. Among the influences mentioned in many reports are Abu Qatada and Abu Hamaza. They still live in London, free to speak.

Well, as many readers know, there are individuals who have supported the attacks on the World Trade Centre, and some live in Britain as refugees who have been granted asylum. This poses a dilemma for those who support the human rights of refugees and asylum seekers, and a threat to the concept of asylum.

Should a society be expected to offer sanctuary to people who preach its destruction and who recruit gullible individuals to effect such an outcome? And how do you guard against this without destroying the complex weave of rights developed over centuries? Let’s face it, new US regulations have already eroded civil liberties dramatically. But then, at least these liberties exist. They don’t in many countries, some Muslim, some not, but all belching out asylum seekers.

Another question – how do you promote reciprocity? A person can come to Britain or Ireland and preach holy war and the destruction of the west, but a person cannot go to an Islamic country and preach anything other than orthodoxy. If he does, he’s liable to be imprisoned and possibly killed. It’s worse for a woman. And as for adulterers...

Okay, so that’s bad, and it’s a dilemma we’ll all have to deal with in the new multicultural dispensation. If we are going to do so, we have to become clearer about what we ourselves espouse. And I think we’ll find that we’re not half as open as we think. Such certainly has been the experience of the European countries that most closely resemble Ireland, i.e. Denmark, Finland and Holland.

We’ll also have to interrogate our attitudes to the West. For example, we have now arrived at the point where the US has killed more people in Afghanistan than were killed in the Twin Towers. And bin Laden and Mullah Omar are still at large. I thought their capture was the point of the war. But maybe I was wrong...

Yeah, it’s all about consistency. Is an American intrinsically more valuable than an Afghan?

Consistency... look, we’ve just seen former Soviet leader Gorbachev receive the freedom of Dublin. I’ve no problem with that. He untied the knot that bound eastern Europe to Russia. The rest of Europe hasn’t really recovered yet, but what of it?

Gorbachev is celebrated as the man who brought down communism. At this remove, not everyone in Russia is convinced that this was a good thing. Capitalism has proved a boon for gangsters and cowboys, but a bad bargain for the lumpen footsoldiers.

Meanwhile, Argentina’s economy has gone belly up. They’ve uncoupled their peso from the dollar. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are being invoked. The receiver is at the door. So when is Dublin’s City Council going to award the last Argentinian president for bringing down capitalism? Consistency, ya know what I mean?

And while I’m on the subject, when are we Irish going to deliver on the esteem in which we’re held around the world and make a meaningful gesture on Palestine? It just goes from bad to worse. I know we’ve had another outbreak of the heebies in Ardoyne. But on balance, while that threatens the peace process and the population of this island, it doesn’t threaten the existence of the human race like the Middle Eastern situation does. It could well lurch us all into a massive conflagration in which one army after another wades in, leading to a nuclear exchange and Armageddon.

Indeed, a more global perspective might be gleaned from the reports that a major asteroid gave us all a close shave last week. They call it YB5. It measures between 220 and 490 metres. Two football stadia, in other words, which is big enough to wipe out a major country if it scored a direct hit. And it nearly did. It passed within 600,000km of us.

The experts tell us that there was no danger. But they add that the distance was a mere cosmic whisker...

Had it struck close by, we might be forced to leave our happy homes. We might have to become wanderers again. We might wind up looking for sustenance and shelter and sanctuary in other places. We might even be called refugees. Those who object to the presence of people from other countries might ponder how they themselves would feel in such circumstances. The world, and our rights to bits and pieces of it, is not as dependable or inalienable as we might think.