By John Spain

There are many positive aspects to the huge immigration that Ireland has experienced in recent years. The coffee bar in the newspaper office block where I work, for example, is entirely staffed by young immigrants. They’re bright and cheerful and make excellent coffee and, if you like, they can discuss Sartre or Kafka with you while you’re waiting.

A younger brother of mine has a couple of gourmet pizza shops in Dublin (where the dough is made fresh every day) and now has an entirely Polish workforce. Unlike the young Irish staff he had, they are punctual, reliable, honest and fastidious about doing the job well.

Which is probably also why the reception and service staff in the four and five star hotels in Dublin are now almost exclusively European. They’re like the Irish kids used to be before they were spoiled by the boom.

Half the building sites in Dublin now have foreign workers. And Polish plumbers, painters and electricians are also in demand for domestic jobs because they do good work and charge around *10 an hour (unlike the *25 an hour their Irish counterparts want).

It’s an undeniable fact that the economic boom we have had here would not have been sustained for so long without the input of these East Europeans workers, and in particular the Poles.

And it’s not just a question of economics. The influx of young East Europeans here has added a vibrancy to Ireland that is the envy of other countries in Europe with aging populations.

Dublin may be the ancient capital of Ireland, with stories that reach back from Yeats and Joyce all the way to the Vikings. But these days it’s also the cosmopolitan first city of the Celtic Tiger, where old meets new in a heady fusion that has made the city one of the most happening destinations in Europe, at the cutting edge of the arts.

A vital ingredient in that buzz is the presence of so many bright young people from right across the continent who have made Ireland their new home.

Personally, I have some worries about the dilution of our unique culture, although it’s worth remembering that it’s nearly 100 years since Joyce made the son of a European Jew who had come to live here the hero of Ulysses, the greatest book ever written about Dublin.

Overall, the effect of the recent massive immigration here has been positive, as I said above. But having underlined that, there are negatives as well, and pretending they don’t exist (as the politically correct here like to do) won’t make them go away.

You’re considered to be a suspect racist here even to mention this, but there is another side to immigration here, both from Eastern Europe and from further afield, that is corrupt and violent. The majority of young immigrants who come here from Eastern Europe may be delightful, but there is a significant minority who are a horror story.

This undesirable minority are the leftovers from the old Communist culture, the culture that produced alienated kids who avoided work, learned to cheat the system, organized themselves in gangs and lived off all kinds of scams. Now that they are over here they behave the same way.

There is also a problem with a significant minority of immigrants who have come here from further afield, from places like Russia or Moldova, Nigeria or the Congo. Again these immigrants are coming from places that are often corrupt and violent, and some of those who arrive here are not the innocent victims we like to think but are the ones who were streetwise enough to make it out.

Some of the sub-Saharan immigrants who used the Irish baby route in here are a good example, destroying their documents on the way in, lying about the circumstances they have come from and running rings around our politically correct system by making emotive and exaggerated claims about the risk of female circumcision if they are not allowed stay.

A further problem with some of these groups is that they have little English, low job skills and make little effort to integrate or be self-sufficient. A minority are involved in drugs, prostitution and (in the case of some Chinese immigrants) extortion.

Many in this undesirable segment of immigrants do not come here directly from Africa or Russia or wherever, but from other European countries where they were living and where they have exhausted the immigration system and are in danger of being deported. Ireland is seen as an easy option.

The common factor among most of these undesirable immigrants is a lack of interest in doing normal work, and an involvement in semi-criminal scams or even serious crime. The Gardai (police), for example, say that the first crack cocaine bust here was of African dealers a few years ago.

Some of the crime is less deadly, like immigration scams, credit card fraud and part-time prostitution. But there is a lot of it going on, and crime associated with immigrants is now a significant part of the scene here, and immigrants already make up a disproportionate part of the prison population.

In politically correct Ireland, however, there is a reluctance in official circles to mention crime and ethnic origin in the same breath. Do so and you are likely to be called a racist, even though it seems to me obvious that such information is vital for public policy making in the immigration area.

Let me give one example. Recently the Gardai arrested a number of men in the south of Ireland, having raided a house and discovering a credit card skimming operation complete with the necessary technology, stolen cards, card blanks, etc.

There was a lengthy report of this on the Five-Seven Live radio show on RTE radio which I listened to as I was driving home. The report went on for several minutes and, since credit card skimming was unknown here before immigration began (the local criminals not being clever enough to do it), I waited to hear whether this was another gang of East Europeans who seem to be the experts in this kind of crime.

Even though it was a very long radio report, no mention was made of where the gang was from. Yet that night when the same item was on the TV news with the arrested men visible it was clear that they were immigrants.

In spite of this kind of Big Brother-style censorship, however, examples of serious crime associated with immigrants here break through the surface every now and then and get a lot of attention.

And none more so than the tragic case a week ago of a 28-year-old Latvian woman called Baiba Saulite, the mother of two young boys, who was murdered in cold blood by a hitman on the doorstep of her home in Swords, Co. Dublin, while the children slept upstairs.

Several aspects of this horrific killing made this a huge story here last week. First was the fact that it was a contract killing — and suspected of ordering the hit was her Lebanese husband (in Ireland since the 1980s) who is currently serving a few years in jail here for a big stolen car racket which involved several immigrants.

He is suspected of ordering the hit from prison, and it is known that he has links both to immigrant gangs and some of the most vicious thugs in Limerick and Dublin.

She came over here about six years ago with her Latvian boyfriend, but that relationship ended. She then met the Lebanese man, Hassan Hassan (now 38), who drove BMWs, had lots of money and told her he was Greek Orthodox.

He did not tell her he already had at least one child by an Irish woman and he was, in fact, a Muslim from Lebanon. After she married him and had two kids everything changed, and he insisted she bring up the boys as Muslims and ordered her not to see her Latvian friends. His religious devotion did not, however, stop him running a major car theft and export racket.

Eventually they separated, and then he kidnapped the kids and sent them to his relatives in Syria. Last year she went on radio here tearfully appealing for help.

In the end she went over there herself and got the kids back. He had been jailed when the car racket was busted.

As far as she was concerned their relationship was over. She was hoping he would get an additional few years in jail for the kidnapping. But she felt that she was in danger from his friends on the outside, a feeling that increased a month ago when her car was fire-bombed.

She moved house and typed up a lengthy document for the court hearing about the abduction of the kids, in which she spoke about how her life was under threat.

At the same time, her solicitor received death threats and was given Garda protection. But she was not, something that is now being investigated internally in the Gardai.

All of which made this highly controversial and a huge story here. She was a pretty young woman, devoted to her kids, and everyone who knew her thought she was a lovely, warm and honest person.

She had come here to make a better life. And she deserved a chance. Her tragedy was to meet a lying, violent criminal.

Nothing has been proven against her husband who, of course, has the perfect alibi. But you don’t have to be a genius to work it out.

It’s a tragedy for one individual and her two small boys (Hassan Hassan immediately sought release from jail to look after them and was refused). But on a wider level, it shows once again the nature of crime among some immigrants here, and the total disregard of some of them for our laws and beliefs.