What a sad country this is, sometimes. Even sadder is the fact that we reflect the wider world.

Just over the last couple of days, a motley crew of assorted UN bods was here to examine the state of various detention centres and, hardly astoundingly, they came to the conclusion that all was not of five-star quality.

For many reasons, I tend to take much of what package tours full of do-gooders have to say with quite a healthy dose of salt.

In the few short hours they have in between nourishing themselves and trying to meet everyone and her brother, relevant or not to their investigations, these visiting fire-men will of necessity get plenty wrong or emphasise the wrong thing.

They'll then shoot back off to their comfy offices to wreak more havoc on the rainforest by producing reams' worth of reports. Heaven forfend that they should take realities into consideration.

It is a mark of reports such as these that any opportunity to state the bleedin' obvious is certainly never missed. Did we really need a UN band of worthies to tell us we have an unsatisfactory system for handling the hundreds of people who wash up on our shores?

But even more depressing than the notion that the UN (more precisely, the bits of it that arrange these jollies) thinks that this country is incapable of recognising its own deficiencies (unlike the countries whence some of the members of the delegation hail) is the alacrity with which many of our citizens gave cause for this to be seen as being the case.

Many of the comments that appeared below the story on Friday night demonstrate precisely what I mean.

Predictably xenophobic, nauseatingly racist and disgustingly smug, emanating mainly from the usual suspects, these comments - simply by dint of the fact that they were made at all, to say nothing of the revolting nature of their content - made me wonder whether we aren't, in fact, a country that should be ashamed of many of its citizens.

Luckily, despite the erudite observations of the UN junketeers, there are many of our citizens who are doing their level best to cope even while much of the rest of the world looks elsewhere and pretends to be doing something constructive by writing reports.