Controversy over the deportation of school students has shown how the ethnic mix of Irish education is changing. It's time to make plans to deal with this new era of multiculturalism in the classroom, writes Paul Cullen.

It is one of the most revolutionary changes currently occurring in Irish education, yet one to which relatively little attention has been paid.

It hardly featured at the recent teacher conferences, which were dominated by the traditional bugbears such as student indiscipline, funding gaps and resources.

Neither will you find much mention of it on the Department of Education's website, which is otherwise replete with information and statistics, or in the speeches of the departmental ministers carried on the site.

What's at issue here is the massive change, in just a few short years, in the racial and ethnic mix of so many Irish classrooms throughout the State. Over the past decade, Ireland has become a country of immigration rather than emigration, and our schools are in the cockpit of change.

Almost 170 nationalities are now represented in the State, and most of them are found in our classrooms. One school in west Dublin is host to more than 40 nationalities, while in nearby primary schools, non-nationals account for over 40 per cent of enrolments.

So far, the absorption of so many, whether temporarily or permanently, has gone remarkably smoothly. The harmony between the old and the new was especially evident in recent controversies over the deportation of school pupils to Nigeria.

Palmerstown Community School, now famous as the alma mater of deported-then-returned Leaving Cert student Olukunle Elukanlo, is typical in that it boasts students from at least six different countries.

"We have guys from South Africa, Romania, Nigeria, in our class, but we've grown up with them and we don't consider them in those terms. They're mates," one of Kunle's friends told me last month.

Over in Athlone, local parents are still fighting to prevent the deportation of the Nigerian classmates of their children, and to have others who were deported brought back.

These campaigns have given a new, cross-cultural impetus to "people power" as well as showing that not all young people are politically apathetic.

However, the trend towards multiculturalism or interculturalism is only just beginning, and current sticking-plaster solutions are unlikely to serve us well in the long term.

It is in the nature of demographics that the education system is the first to experience a change in population. So when a leading academic says, as the president of DCU, Ferdinand von Prondzynski, did last month, that Irish people could find themselves in a minority here by the year 2050, it follows that this situation could be arrived at in schools a lot earlier.

Yet it is hard to see what preparations are in place to deal with this scale of change. Are schools equipped to deal with large number of pupils whose first language is not English? How will they cope with the multiplicity of different cultures, identities and religions the new arrivals bring with them? How, indeed, will Irish people be prepared for the psychological shock of finding themselves in a minority in their own classrooms and then in their own society? "The changes currently underway have profound implications, for which we are not well prepared," warns Michael Moriarty, chief executive of the Irish Vocational Education Association.

"It's not just a Dublin phenomenon, either. If you walk down any provincial town and look at the faces and listen to the voices, it's extraordinary the number of non-nationals you will come across.

The education system has always been slow to respond to change, he says, but in this case this process will have to be managed in an even shorter time than usual.

One of the initial challenges is to assess the uptake of education into the future. In the old days, it was simple; you counted the number of babies in the maternity hospitals and took that as the base for primary-school enrolment five years later. You took a little off for emigration, but if more people left the country, that just made for smaller class sizes.

With immigration, it's much harder to do these sums. People come here, have babies, then leave; conversely, immigrant workers come to Ireland with children born elsewhere. Immigration surges and recedes in line with economic conditions.

It's worth remembering, too, that Ireland still has the highest fertility rate in the EU, in spite of declines over the past two decades.

According to the Central Statistics Office, the population of under-15s is set to almost double between 2001 and 2016, going from 827,000 to about 1.5 million.

There is little enough information available about the racial mix in schools today. Indeed, this paucity of information was criticised in a 2002 report on education and anti-racism, which pointed to the "very limited official education data" on black and minority ethnic groups.

The same theme was taken up recently by a group of non-governmental organisations in a shadow report to the UN on Ireland's human rights performance. It said the lack of data was "particularly surprising in view of the fact that the sheer numbers of new pupils from migrant families will have a major impact on the Irish education system in years to come, especially in urban areas where migrant workers are more likely to be".

According to the report, the education system is failing to address the needs of families who are not members of the dominant religious culture.

"The vast majority of Irish schools remain under the ownership and management of the Catholic church, due to the State's abrogation of its responsibility to develop an inclusive state system of primary education," the report added.

Even the UN's own monitors, during recent hearings investigating Ireland's compliance with the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, queried whether more could not be done for minority groups in the education system.

Multidenominational schools account for only 1 per cent of primary-school enrolment, so most parents have little choice regarding their children's education. Before, this issue tended to be seen as one that concerned agnostics or non-practising Catholics; now it most definitely applies to the growing numbers of Muslims, Hindus and other religions in the country.

"I see massive challenges ahead," says Philip Watt, director of the National Consultative Council on Racism and Interculturalism. "You have, for instance, Muslim children in Catholic schools who are sitting at the back of the class or playing in the corridor while the rest are being taught religion. That's hardly acceptable in the long run."

Maybe it was acceptable when just a few students were involved, but that's hardly the case when half the students in the classroom aren't Catholic. How are schools with a Catholic ethos to adapt to these changes and still treat all their children equally? And how does the State propose to deal with this situation: by adapting the existing school system, providing more multi-denominational education or by allowing for the provision of more denominational education in other faiths?

Another key decision for the State to take relates to the level of integration to be provided in schools and society. There's a long spectrum to travel between complete assimilation of our immigrants and a laissez-faire policy that would leave immigrant communities to their own cultural and linguistic devices.

"We have to respect individual culture; after all, didn't we spend 800 years fighting for our own," says Moriarty. "But there has to a payback, such as the teaching of English by the State as the first language."

Mutual respect is all very well, but things in multiracial-land can get pretty complex. In one classroom in Manchester, Moriarty relates, students of 23 different nationalities celebrate their national days, which adds up to a lot of flags and anthems and time off.

The school timetable is already under great pressure, so how then to accommodate the requirements of our new immigrants? Should we, as one garda suggested last week, be teaching Chinese rather than Irish?

Resources are also an issue. The Department has been providing direct support to schools since 1999 to support the language needs of minority ethnic students. Schools which have 14 or more non-English speaking non-national pupils enrolled are entitled to an additional full-time temporary teacher, according to the Department's information booklet for schools on asylum-seekers. Top-up grants are also available, but whether this support is enough to meet the complex needs of the racial melting pot is doubtful.

We could do nothing. We could let immigrants - and Irish people - find their own way, providing only the minimum of supports. But we only have to look at the mess other European countries have made - the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries - to see the folly of such a course of action.