The libel laws in Ireland are even more restrictive than those in the UK, yet Radio Telefis Eireann was confident enough of its facts to name a Dublin resident of 25 years, Ibrahim Buisir, of Libyan and Irish nationality, who headed an NGO thought to be fundraising indirectly for al-Qaeda. His contacts allegedly included Osama bin Laden's private secretary. Although he had been named by the US Treasury as having directed an al-Qaeda cell, and was monitored by the Irish police, it was not until the spring of 2008, when Libya wanted him for alleged terror offences and Interpol had issued a global arrest warrant, that Buisir fled Ireland. 

The programme also touched on the Islamic Cultural Centre in Dublin, but did not have time to go into the scarier details of its role as an HQ for the Muslim Brotherhood. Financed by Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the deputy ruler of Dubai, it opened in 1996 on a four-acre site in Clonskeagh alongside a mosque and a school. The centre is run by the Al-Maktoum Foundation, all of whose directors are from the United Arab Emirates, and it houses the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR), the Muslim Brotherhood front-organisation created in 1997, whose president is Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. He visits Ireland only occasionally, but he is the spiritual leader of those who claim to speak for Sunnis. The ECFR general secretary, the Egyptian Hussein Mohammed Halawa, is also the imam of Clonskeagh mosque. Although his English is so bad he speaks to journalists through an interpreter, he is also chairman of the 14-strong Irish Council of Imams. Currently, the Department of Foreign Affairs insists that official translations from Arabic into English be done at Clonskeagh mosque — an interesting venue for persecuted Christian asylum-seekers from, say, Egypt. Qaradawi, Ken Livingstone's "progressive" chum, is indeed the modernist — if not the moderate — he is represented as being. Is he not a televangelist, with populist websites? Does he not say that female genital mutilation — though desirable — is optional? Does he not endorse the right of women to be suicide bombers? Does he not charge their husbands to beat them only lightly? Nor is he hung-up on methods of dealing with homosexuals: should no cliffs be available to chuck them off, stoning or burning are acceptable. 

Even if the elite showed little interest in the television revelations, moderate Muslims were frightened, Irish police and intelligence stepped up their activity and as in the UK, the man and woman in the street heard the alarm bells before their masters did. A 2007 poll showed that 47 per cent agreed that Islamic fundamentalism posed a serious threat to Ireland. 

As the Muslim population is disproportionately young, it is the younger Irish that are most curious about those people who live parallel existences alongside them at university. There is lively debate on mpac.ie, the Irish Muslim Public Affairs Committee's website. Now receiving more than 250,000 hits a month, it is run by an Irishman, Liam Egan, aka Muhajid. He and his British wife were members of the International Church of Christ, which believed that all except its adherents were bound for hell, but they converted to Islam in 1995. In the autumn of 2008, he insisted that his daughter Shekinah be allowed to wear the hijab at school in Wexford, which precipitated much media coverage and impassioned debate of the kind that Egan revels in. The principal agreed, and the Department of Education ruled that all schools were free to allow the hijab. It was a victory for exceptionalism and separation.