Anyway, I was busy constructing an intro for a column in which I would describe Dermot Ahern as the government's hypocrite-in-chief when I read what he actually said when he was in the United States. And then it became clear that Dermot Ahern is no mere hypocrite: he is the government's willing fool.

Illegal Irish immigrants were "entitled" to be in America, Ahern said, before going on to deny that their position was in anyway comparable to that of illegal immigrants in Ireland. "I don't think you can make comparisons. They're not the same, " he said.

The minister is of course, completely right, but not in the way he intended. What he actually meant was that the Irish in America (who, we shouldn't forget, are living there by their own free will, in the knowledge that they are illegal and who could return to the bosom of the Celtic Badger at any point) deserve some kind of special status.

By contrast, Ahern implies, the 41 Afghans (who, we shouldn't forget, are in Ireland out of a sense of desperation and fear, who are forbidden from working here, who are not illegal, having been brought into the asylum process, and who would return, it seems likely, to a less than enthusiastic reception in Kabul) deserve nothing but the attention of a mealymouthed and secretive asylum system.

He wouldn't use words like mealymouthed and secretive, of course, because it is a point of absolute principle with the government that Ireland's asylum system is fair and balanced and respectful of those whose applications it processes. In reality, although it has certainly improved over the years, it is still, as Peter O'Mahony pointed out during the week, riddled with major flaws and inconsistencies.

O'Mahony, the chief executive of the Irish Refugee Council, is one of the most reliable guides to the asylum process. Although his sympathies are clearly and obviously with the people who have to deal with the system, he never hypes the problems which plague it or makes things seem worse than they are. "To be recognised as a refugee [in Ireland] one has to face an extremely stringent test, " he said last week. "Many who have fled situations of extreme danger such as war or generalised violence may not pass this test, even if they face death on return to the country from which they fled."

He went on to point out that Ireland's overall rate of granting asylum compares badly to countries like Austria "which, with far more asylum seekers, gives protection to some 50% of all who seek asylum here". The Irish figure, according to a report published last week is 7.9%.

Like no other debate in Irish life, the argument over immigration and asylum is almost immune to such facts. The outbreak of jackassery, exaggeration and dishonesty which accompanied the Afghan hunger strike highlighted this vividly. No matter what radio show you tuned into, fools and buffoons from all over the country were ringing in to make yet another outrageous claim about the asylum process. We're being overrun by immigrants, or they're living it up when they come here, or we're a soft touch, or they're stealing our jobs.

Inadvertently, the Afghan hunger strikers sparked off a tsunami of ignorance in which every prejudice, urban myth and drink-fuelled rumour got an airing.

This is hardly surprising given the extent to which government ministers like Dermot Ahern and Michael McDowell buy into and perpetuate those lies. In Dermot Ahern's world, illegal Irish immigrants in the US, all of whom are earning and many of whom are earning very well, are more deserving of support than Afghan asylum seekers in Ireland, who are given less than 20 per week and forbidden to work. On Planet McDowell, Afghanistan is not a bad old place to be, a society occasionally pockmarked by "disturbances", as he called them during the hunger strike, but not the kind of country from which we should take asylum claims seriously.

Disturbances are the kind of thing that happened on O'Connell Street during the attempted Love Ulster march earlier in the year, so before attempting to describe what's been happening in Afghanistan, we should probably look at some recent newspaper coverage of a very troubled nation.

As McDowell played down the situation there during the hunger strike, the Washington Post was reporting that more than 100 people had been killed in fighting in the previous few days. Afghanistan had been "rocked. . . by some of the deadliest violence since the Taliban was driven from power in late 2001, " reporter Pamela Constable wrote. In recent months, the level of violence had increased "and now includes suicide bombings".

Last Tuesday, CNN put the number of dead in the previous six days at 300. On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that 3,000 people had fled their homes because of heavy fighting. "Meanwhile the United Nations said a funding shortfall may force it to cut food aid to 2.7 million Afghans, warning that such reductions could further destabilize the country."

I could go on, but there's probably no point. People will believe what they want to about asylum seekers and economic immigrants and neither fact nor reality will be a barrier to that. And as long as myth makers like Dermot Ahern and Michael McDowell are around to exploit ignorance rather than challenge it, that situation will continue.