The most heartbreaking tragedy of the third millennium is the constant movement of people across the world seeking a better life elsewhere!
More distressing still is the picture most of the world has seen in the past few days of Vietnam beauty Pham Thi Tra My.
All 26-year-old Pham Thi wanted was an opportunity to work hard abroad so she could send money home to her family, which went heavily into debt for her chance overseas.
What happened to Pham Thi when she lost her life with 38 others in a freezing container where nobody could breathe is a catastrophe that defies description.
Police and other justice agencies stretching from Ireland through Britain, France, Belgium and Bulgaria and across to countries in Asia are currently trying to smash the gangs of traffickers and people-smugglers that sent Pham Thi to her death.
There have been arrests – and clearly more are anticipated – so I have no intention of frustrating a vital series of criminal investigations with comment here.
But I do, with some sadness, recall a personal encounter with desperate Vietnamese people seeking help from the west.
That was 40 years ago when I flew on a charity-organised flight to collect boat people who had been rescued from a sinking vessel by a British-registered cargo ship in the South China Sea and taken to Kaohsiung port in Taiwan.
Although the Vietnam War ended four years earlier, the migration of people fleeing the country was at its height in 1979.
Thousands lost their lives at sea as their tiny overcrowded boats overturned in storms or were raided by pirates.
There was a difference between what happened then and the risks people like Pham Thi take today.
As an international humanitarian crisis developed at the end of the Vietnam War, with the Southeast Asian countries increasingly unwilling to accept more boat people on their shores, communities in Europe, Britain, the US and Canada willingly offered help.
There were many young women who looked like Pham Thi aboard the boat people flight I was on when it flew from Kaohsiung to London.
They were eventually settled across Britain and, I understand, a couple of families on that plane also moved to the east coast of Ireland.
How different it is today!
Anti-immigration regulations and reluctant communities prevent many desperate people finding a better life in the west.
Is it too much to hope that, somehow, western governments and communities can resolve their own difficulties and make room for deserving cases which otherwise are stigmatised as illegal immigrants?
As long as borders are closed and there is a hostile political climate towards immigrants and refugees, they will keep attempting desperate measures to improve their lives and those of their families back home.
The world must unite to resolve the problem - otherwise ruthless traffickers will continue not to care if their victims live or die.
