Reality, recording it and unreality

Via Mulley and indirectly through Una Mullally a few weeks back in her Tribune column:

Holy mother of sweet divine Lord, will you just get on with your life.

While we are on the subject of representation, why is Sean Whelan (RTE’s Europe correspondent) talking about (report available from here) a proposal to limit “legal and illegal imigration” in July 2008 when the very same proposals have been around and about the EU scene for some seven months now? In an email from Robin Hanan of the Irish Refugee Council received here yesterday:

If you look closely, you we see that the story is really about the Irish Department and Minister for JELR commenting that they might opt into such a Pact … . The spin put on this story is strongly anti-immigrant (e.g. RTE: EU talks on illegal immigration; Independent: Crackdown on illegal aliens). The Pact does not get a mention in any of the main French or UK papers, and has just cropped up later this morning on the main Brussels/EU monitoring site Euractiv..

In fact, there is no Pact yet – there are various leaks of working drafts dating back as far as January. The draft up for preliminary discussion this week seems to be the undated one attached (sorry – only in French), but we cannot vouch for this. The Euractiv leak gives a fairly detailed idea of what might be in the Pact. The response by our umbrella body, ECRE, is (also in French) at www.ecre.org/resources/press_releases/1120 and a number of background papers (in English) are on the home page at www.ecre.org.

Perhaps the Irish office in Brussels are wishing to be seen to be ‘doing something about those immigrants’ in this post-Lisbon Ireland.

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