"No blacks allowed in these toilets" - security guard.

It was the morning of August 29th, 1997, and 16-year-old Adhil Essalhi had left the building site where he was a sheet metal apprentice to use the toilets in the Ilac shopping centre next door.

The toilet facilities on the site, an almost completed Burger King restaurant, were dirty and Adhil didn't use them if he could avoid it. He approached the Ilac Centre toilet, watched as the security guard blocked his path, and flushed with anger.

He turned to challenge him and what happened next was dissected last week in the Circuit Court of Appeal.

Later, as he struggled to get free of his uniformed assailants Adhil wished he had kept running when he had finally escaped the hold of the security man by the toilets.

A fast runner, he had sprinted all the way to the GPO and told the garda on duty what had happened. He was advised to go back by another route, so he waited by the Ambassador Cinema across the road from the site until the coast was clear.

As he ran up the steps to the site three security guards followed him. "I told them I didn't want any trouble. I said I wouldn't let them take me outside," he says. Adhil was surrounded, pinned on the ground and then he says the grown men in uniform proceeded to "dance" on his back.

He was crying now, bruised all over as a doctor's report would later confirm. "You can take me out now," he said defeated. So they did, but Adhil stopped at a low wall outside locking his knees to his stomach while they slapped him around. The men then dragged him into the shopping centre saying they were going to beat him some more before the police came. At this stage his co-workers shouted at the men to let him go. They did so just minutes before the gardai arrived.

"Have they arrested the nigger yet?" - security guard controller The voice from the central security operations room came over the two way radio held by one of the security guards as Adhil was led away in handcuffs to a Garda car. The garda at the scene heard the remark. Adhil was kept in Store Street station for one hour and was then advised that if he wanted to make a complaint against the men he would have to make a statement. He returned to do so the following morning with his father.

Adhil will be 18 next month. He smiles and says that a lot has happened to him in the past year and a half. His daughter Tia was born and he was subjected to an horrific incident of verbal and physical abuse because of the colour of his skin.

The attractive young man talks with the unmistakable accent of the Dubliner that he is. He wears the track-suited uniform of a 17-year-old and chats about the pubs he frequents and the craic on the building site where he works. He is working on aluminium windows now, he tells you, and talks about some day travelling to work on sites in America. "I'd love it,' he says.

Sitting in the family home in Clondalkin in Dublin, his Irish mother, Geraldine, says that being married to Farag Essalhi, a Libyan who came here to study engineering 22 years ago, and bringing up four children whose skin is silky brown and not chalky white have not been without their problems.

"You do get them being called names, but a lot of it is just jealousy," she says. One day her daughter Nadia (12) came home and said she wanted to change her colour as a result of the name-calling. "It's all right round here really. Farag gets it a bit more because his skin is darker, he gets people saying `bleedin' nigger' but then when they hear him talking in a real Dublin accent they are surprised."

She says she has noticed an increase in these incidents since the influx of refugees in recent years. Adhil says there is no justification for any of it: "They are people running away from bad situations in their countries. It is just ignorance," he says.

"You know all you niggers like to take it up the ass" - another security guard.

Three men were subsequently charged as a result of the incident and in the Dublin District Court last October two of them were convicted of the common assault of Adhil Essahli. Security guards John Kavanagh and Paul Fennell received prison sentences of six months and three months respectively.

Since then Fennell has received a security management award at the Dublin Institute of Technology and Kavanagh has been promoted to a supervisory role by his company, Delta. In the Circuit Court of Appeal on March 10th they admitted the assault but denied, through their solicitors, that there was any racial motivation in their attack. Their sentences were quashed and the Probation Act applied.

Adhil is still angry. "I just feel they haven't been punished, they have got away with it and it won't stop them doing it again. They are still racists," he says.

His father Farag, a strict Muslim, is upset but asks what can anyone do? "It is wrong and it shouldn't happen, but it does every day and it is going to get worse. I will never let anybody get away with it, I will always challenge them," he says.

Adhil is taking civil proceedings against the three men and while he says he doesn't care about the money he hopes that it will allow "some kind of justice to be done". "Black, white, red or yellow," says his father. "We are all God's children and that is the same with people everywhere."