There is "a ready market for racism" in Ireland, and schoolchildren must be prepared for life in a multicultural society, the general secretary of the Irish National Teachers Organisation has said.
Senator Joe O'Toole introduced an INTO report on educational supports for refugee and ethnic minority children at the Holy Family senior school in Ennis, Co Clare, yesterday. The school has pupils from Somalia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Iraq, Russia and Latvia. There are about 300 refugees in the Ennis area.
The local Catholic bishop, Dr Willie Walsh, said: "The Government and all of us have a moral responsibility to respond to the special needs of refugee children and other ethnic minorities. There is enrichment in diversity and we are not talking about charity, but a moral obligation to cherish all children equally."
Mr O'Toole said: "It is a bewildering experience for children to be plucked from a village in rural Africa or a remote area of eastern Europe and to find themselves a few days later in an Irish community and school surrounded by people with whom they cannot communicate.
"Understanding and communication are fundamental to the educational process," he added. "If the teacher cannot speak to the child or vice-versa, then teaching and learning are severely impaired and in some cases impossible. If the teacher cannot discuss the child's problems or progress with the parents then the whole basis of home-school relations collapses.
"The question of parity of esteem for these children also arises. How do we recognise and respect their different beliefs and cultural values? How do we include them?
". . . There is a resistance to change in our society and there is a ready market for racism. For this reason we must also address methods of preparing our pupils for a multicultural community."
The INTO report finds there is no support for the educational needs of asylum-seekers' children either from the Department of Education and Science or any other Government agency. It notes the five teachers in the Department of Education's temporary Refugee Support Service are confined to working with 78 children in the Dublin area. This means there are many refugee and asylum-seekers' children who never receive the service.
The INTO also considers it "totally unacceptable" that refugee support teachers are "forced to discriminate" between children whose families have officially-recognised refugee status and other ethnic minority and asylum-seekers' children "who have the same needs and may sometimes be in the same school".
Among the report's nearly 50 recommendations are:
A national policy to ensure all ethnic minority children have equal access to education.
The expansion of the Refugee Support Service to include all non-EU ethnic minority children.
A special grant for all schools with refugee pupils enrolled.
Pre-service and in-service teacher training in the needs of ethnic minority pupils.
Resources to be made available to meet the needs of pupils learning English as a second language.
Bilingual classroom assistants, where necessary, who are proficient in the relevant ethnic minority language.