Alan Richardson, the acting head of the National Safety Council was the first to bring up this subject a few weeks ago, and since then he has been joined in his concern for the damage that immigrants are doing . . . to themselves and to others . . .by the garda commissioner, an assistant commissioner and the head of the garda's traffic bureau.

There's no way you could have listened to the news over the last few weeks and not come away with the idea that feckless immigrants are a clear and present danger on our roads, the key reason why the number of fatalities is on the increase. There has already been talk of "educating" them about their bad habits, as though they had moved to a country with an impeccable record on drinkdriving.

At the time of this writing, Thursday afternoon, 41 people have died on Irish roads in 2006. Of these, 10 were non-nationals . . . about 25%. This does seem like a high figure, and is probably the reason why the driving habits of immigrants have received so much comment.

Look behind the figures, however, and an entirely different story emerges. Of the 10 non-nationals killed, only five were driving the vehicles involved. Of these five, only three look as though they were drinking and driving. One of those three died in the early hours of last Sunday morning, on a stretch of road on the Naas dual carriageway which I'd been on earlier that evening.

Extensive roadworks are being carried out there with barriers on either side of a fairly twisty stretch of road.

It's a dangerous drive in the dark; perhaps that was a contributory factor.

For the sake of argument, however, let's put that fatality down to non-national drunkeness. That's three non-nationals out of 41 killed by their own recklessness. In one other fatal accident this month, a non-national appears to have been the driver responsible, although he was not killed. That's four out of 41. We're suddenly down to 10%.

Four drunk drivers is four too many, and if there are ways to decrease that figure, by all means let us find them and implement them. But this sudden focus on nonnationals deflects attention from the real problem, which is Irish-made, by Irish drivers and by Irish driving standards, and which is up to Irish drivers and Irish decision-makers to sort out.

This unhealthy obsession with non-nationals comes at a time when race has suddenly reared its ugly head again. Fine Gael threw a hissy fit last week when junior minister Brian Lenihan suggested that it might have been in some way racist in its criticism of the decision to award the Budget children's supplement to non-resident offspring of immigrant workers. Labour is no less miffed at Micheal Martin's claim that Pat Rabbitte had played the "race card" when he suggested that there might be a need to introduce work permits for some EU workers wanting to earn a living here.

One of the difficulties about the immigration debate is that accusations of racism have been tossed around like rusks at a children's mass. One of the curiosities about the current debate is that it is PD/Fianna Fail having in the past rewarded racist comments from within its own ranks, which is supplying most of the tossers. Martin and Lenihan were stretching a point rather too far in attributing racism to the two main opposition parties, but there can be little doubt now that Fine Gael and Labour have decided to tap into public hostility to immigrants. That is a very dangerous game and one which, if played in a gratuitous and careless fashion, does start to become racist over time.

It's not racist to have fears and doubts about the levels of migration into this country and it's not racist to want to have stricter controls. Neither, if you're a government, is it racist to implement such controls as long as you do it in a thoughtful and measured way and you're not doing it simply to keep black people out. However, it is racist to peddle the kind of myths about immigrants and asylum seekers which have been keeping a large segment of the Irish population in a state of nearpermanent outrage for a decade and more. The question for all political parties, but particularly at the moment Fine Gael and Labour, is whether it is also racist to leave these myths unchallenged and to sneakily, gently, exploit them.

Last week's report in this newspaper about market research which had been carried out for the Labour Party in advance of Pat Rabbitte's comments on work permits was an eyeopener. The focus group interviewed . . . people aged 20 to 40 years old (so you would think they'd know better) . . .

perpetuated all the usual myths about asylum seekers.

They were screwing our social welfare system while simultaneously owning several houses in their own countries; they were abandoning prams when boarding buses because they could easily claim new ones. "Next time I go down to the A&E, I'm going to paint my face black, " one woman in Meath East said. "Maybe then I won't be waiting four hours."

Shortly after that research, Rabbitte played the race card. The report had advised him to dispel many of the commonly-held myths and to publish a concise and understandable statement on immigration, but instead he went his own way, allowing these arguments to continue unchallenged, thereby giving them respectability. That may not yet be racist behaviour, but neither is it the behaviour of a Labour Party that some of us used to support.