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Racism fears as city school opens for black pupils only

David Sharrock, Ireland Correspondent
An emergency all-black school is to open in Dublin to cater for the children of African immigrants who have failed to secure places in the overloaded Irish education system.

Mary Hanafin, the Education Minister, said that the problems in the north Dublin suburb of Balbriggan reflected bad planning amid rapid population growth, not racist attitudes at existing schools. She vowed to get the new school integrated with white students as soon as possible.

“I would not like to see a situation developing where it is an all-black school, so it’s something to keep an eye on for next year’s enrolments,” Ms Hanafin said.

However, the head of the organisation providing the new school said that it was a concern because demand was coming from a specific sector of Ireland’s ethnic minority. “Almost all of the people applying appear to be of black skin and that is a worrying phenomenon,” said Paul Rowe, the chief executive of Educate Together, a charity that provides an alternative to faith-based education.

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Ninety-eight per cent of schools in the Republic of Ireland are religious institutions.

Mr Rowe said that Educate Together was asked to establish the emergency school by the Irish Government’s education department on August 27. Bracken Educate Together National School will open on September 17 with a principal and four classes catering for about 70 children.

A meeting in Balbriggan over the weekend for families who had failed to secure places for their children in Balbriggan’s schools was attended by parents mainly of African origin.

The parents said that they had tried to get their children into local schools but were told that all places had to be reserved by February. Almost all the children are Irish citizens.

But some questioned why white families who had moved into the town this year had managed to overcome the registration deadlines to get their children into schools.

Others complained that Ireland’s school system was discriminating against them on the basis of religion. The law permits schools run by the Roman Catholic Church to discriminate on the basis of whether a prospective student has a certificate confirming that they were baptised into the faith.

Some of the African applicants were Muslim, members of evangelical Protestant denominations or of no religious creed. But Ms Hanafin insisted that schools were doing their best and were not applying racist criteria. The crisis is a symptom of Ireland’s economic boom, where development of new housing has raced ahead of poorly planned infrastructure and services.

More than 25,000 Africans have settled in Ireland since the mid1990s. Most arrived as asylum-seekers and many took advantage of Ireland’s law – unique in Europe – of granting citizenship to parents of any Irish-born child. The provision ended after a referendum in 2004.

Mr Rowe said that this was the second school his charity was opening this month. In the other, in Lucan, another town in the Dublin commuter belt, there were also high numbers of children from ethnic minorities.