Ireland Forced to Open Immigrant School

Under a dank sky and with a statue of Christ, arms outstretched in welcome, it seemed like just another opening day in the life of an ordinary Irish primary school. But the school in Balbriggan, Co Dublin, which finally opened its doors yesterday morning, has been the center of a national controversy which has highlighted how Ireland is failing to cope with the influx of tens of thousands of immigrants.

Ireland's newest primary school is overwhelmingly black, the majority of its pupils with parents from Nigeria and some, judging by the number of mothers in head-scarves, from the Islamic faith.

The Irish Republic's almost all-black school was created out of incompetence rather than design. A huge population increase, partly due to immigration from Africa, China and eastern Europe, has put enormous pressure on the school system. The result, according to one local councilor, has been the creation of a "mini-apartheid" in the seaside town, with the new "emergency" school almost exclusively filled with the children of immigrants.

Dozens of children from non-Irish ethnic backgrounds had been turned down by local Catholic schools principally because they did not hold Catholic baptismal certificates. More than 90% of schools in the republic are run by the Catholic church. Up to 100 children were facing the new term with no place at primary school in the north county Dublin region.

Outside the non-denominational school - named Bracken Educate Together - four-year-old Jordan Mulikat was swinging his red lunch box as he bounded through the door. His mother Monika, a Nigerian with a UK passport, said Jordan was happy to have a school place but she believed race had a played a part in the problems she and dozens of other immigrant families had faced. "When I contacted one particular school to see if they had a place for Jordan I was told 'We only pick our own' ...

"When I asked what this meant I was again told 'I am just saying to you that we only pick our own.'

"I think that tells you race was a factor in all of this but I'm just delighted today Jordan has gone to school, at long last."

Balbriggan became home to thousands of immigrants, the majority of them African, because of its proximity to a former Butlin's holiday camp. In the late 1990s the Irish government used the Butlin's site at Mosney on the Irish coast to house thousands of asylum seekers and economic migrants who arrived in the state without accommodation. Those granted citizen status or allowed to remain because their children were born in the country chose to settle mainly in nearby Balbriggan.

Educate Together, the non-denominational schools movement behind the Bracken primary, warned that if Ireland continued to use the criterion of religion in prioritizing school places "racist division is almost inevitable". Paul Rowe, its chief executive, said: "There is profound, embedded and institutionalized religious discrimination throughout the system, particularly at primary level. This discrimination is the responsibility of the state, not of schools or religious bodies. It is inevitable that - in a system where 98% of schools are faith based and permitted to prefer members of their faith in enrollments - those not of the majority religions will be disproportionately represented at the bottom of the queue for places."

The increasingly bitter debate about immigration in Ireland was exposed during Educate Together's press conference yesterday. The chairwoman of the town's council claimed Balbriggan was being made a scapegoat in the controversy over school places for immigrant children.

Outside Bracken Educate Together there was a warmer welcome from the school's neighbors - an almost exclusively white, native Irish, Gaelic-speaking primary that shares the same building. Each child held up a piece of paper with a capital letter that spelt out: Fáilte Romhaibh, Irish for Welcome to You All.