We should help the old, the vulnerable and the children first. And most are still in the camps...

WHAT would it take to make you put your small sons on to a rubber dingy in the middle of the night, without life jackets and knowing they could not swim, to set off on a four-mile journey across choppy seas?

What would make you risk the lives of your young family at the hands of a ruthless trafficker – who had his own lifejacket snugly strapped on – and pay him €4,000 for the illegal journey, when it was probably all you had left in the world?

But Abdullah Kurdi from the Syrian city of Kobani was still much richer than many of his countrymen. The barber’s savings might have run out, but at least he had his sons Galip and Aylan and his wife Rehan, and they were safe and well.

He had got them out of Syria, away from the barrel bombs that Bashar al-Assad is showering on his own people, away from the Saudi- funded Islamic State terrorists beheading, raping, torturing and crucifying them, away from the murderous factions that have torn his country apart.

At least he and his children would not join the hundreds of thousands – perhaps as many as 500,000 – who have so far died in the five-year conflict.

They had reached a refugee camp in Turkey, and his plan was to make it to Vancouver, where his sister Teema lives with her Canadian husband. So he had prospects, he had health and youth and determination on his side, and he had his little family in a place of safety.

Terrorised

Why, then, did he put his wife and his children on to an outsized lilo to cross a dangerous stretch of sea in pitch darkness last week? The reason the Kurdi family had to fling themselves on the smugglers’ mercy is those smugglers were the only ones really offering them the chance of a new life.

For only those refugees who managed to get right under Europe’s skin, across its borders and into its train stations and ferry ports, got our attention.

It was only when they came knocking on our doors, jemmying open container lorries at Calais and clogging up rail platforms in Hungary and dying in chicken trucks in Austria, that we paid them any heed.

But so long as they stayed safely out of sight in squalid Turkish and Jordanian refugee camps, or remained drifting with the displaced millions still inside Syria itself, they could rot for all we cared.

Comparisons have been made between the current refugee crisis and the great movement of threatened, terrorised people during the Second World War. What’s different this time is that the bulk of these refugees are fit and able young men, the men who would have been conscripts or volunteers back in the 1940s, but are now the ones the best equipped to get themselves out of the war zones and over to Europe.

For each of those young men you see milling round the trains in Hungary and Austria, though, there are womenfolk and old people and children left behind in Syria.

And yet, at least up to now, we have focused our efforts on the men with the initiative and the strength to get themselves, and occasionally their families, out of Syria. When we look at television images of refugees, they are the ones we see and we pity, as we should. Poor people, far from home, clutching their few meagre possessions and relying on the charity of strangers, should always move our hearts.

But there are good reasons why our priority here ought to be the most vulnerable victims, the millions of little Aylans and Galips and Rehans who have neither the resources nor the stamina to reach Turkey and Jordan, let alone Kos or Budapest.

Our priority ought to be the elderly, the women and children, the impoverished families who cannot pay people traffickers to put them on lethal boats in the dead of night. For until they are the ones we help first, until we start chartering planes and evacuating refugees directly from these camps on the Syrian border rather than waiting until they’ve reached Europe by their own hazardous devices, the people traffickers will flourish.

There will be more dead children washed up on Mediterranean beaches. And the body count of the poorest, the weakest and the most vulnerable Syrians will continue to rise.

Warlords

If Abdullah Kurdi thought he could rely upon the world to relocate and settle his family away from a Turkish refugee camp, if he knew help was coming, he’d never have put his boys on a boat in the darkness.

And if we are to respond effectively to the utterly needless deaths of two little boys who had escaped to what they hoped was safety, it is on those refugee camps, rather than on the strapping young men arriving in Germany and Hungary and Greece, that we should be concentrating our concern.

There’s nothing unique in human history about savage warlords killing civilians and driving them from their homes. What is capable of changing, however, is how the rest of the world deals with such crises.

And the global response to those little boys’ deaths suggests we are capable of responding on the basis of shared humanity and not quotas, not obligations, not political agendas, not red tape.

We are capable of responding to these people as neighbours to be protected and comforted, not burdens to be resented and resisted. And we need to see this generosity reflected in all communities across Europe, not just the ones with the smallest resources and, as always, the biggest hearts.

In the past week, for example, more than 7,000 Irish people have signed up to offer accommodation to Syrian families. The Government has refused to set an upper limit on the numbers to come here, but it is important that they be distributed as evenly around the country as Irish people clearly wish, and not just bundled together in camps and disused barracks.

Pope Francis’s suggestion that every parish take one family is well worth considering – not just the working class parishes, not just those hard-pressed communities that are always called upon to make sacrifices, but every parish, rich and poor.

Tycoons

Bob Geldof, as he often does, cut to the heart of this dispensation by offering to take in four Syrian families into his houses.

Our own Peter Sutherland is the UN special envoy on emigration and has berated us, in the past, for failing in our duty to be hospitable. But Mr Sutherland is also enormously rich with several homes and a personal fortune of around €150million.

If ordinary people and ordinary communities are willing to shelter refugees, his own community of the mega-rich could also do a great deal more according to their means.

He and his wealthy friends could charter planes, buy up properties, refurbish ghost estates out of their own pockets, and still have more money than they could spend in several lifetimes.

He is, after all, a graduate of Gonzaga College, named after a wealthy Italian nobleman who gave up his money and his title to work with plague victims.

Mr Sutherland has also been named by The Tablet as one of Britain’s most influential Catholics, and I am sure he is privately generous to charity.

But what an example he could set to his affluent community if he were to match Bob Geldof’s offer, or follow the lead of so many of his less-privileged compatriots, and put his own resources at the disposal of these desperate people with a dynamic public gesture.

For the response to Aylan Kurdi’s death shows that ordinary folk don’t need lectures when it comes to extending hospitality towards desperate families: we need leadership. We need solutions and initiatives that will actually work, we need plans and proposals we can get behind.

And, straight away, we need planes in Turkey and Jordan evacuating those refugee camps and taking their inhabitants straight to Ireland, to Sweden, to France, to Germany and to the welcome and the decency that demonstrably awaits them.

What we don’t need is political haggling and hectoring and indecision. And we don’t need to validate the smugglers’ business plans by delegating to them the task of shipping the refugees to Europe, sometimes as pitiful corpses washed up on tourist beaches.