COMMUNITY leaders estimate there are more than 5,000 Muslims in the Republic - up from 3,875 in the 1991 census - and 2,000 in Northern Ireland. About 3,000 to 4,000 live in Dublin.
Unlike in Britain, they are a largely middle class community, and their splendid new cultural centre in up market Clonskeagh is a fitting symbol of their growing, confidence as residents, and increasingly citizens, of this Stute. Mound 85 per cent of Muslims in Ireland either have third level education or are here to study.
"This is a good place to live for Muslims," said the centre's administrator, Mr Mudafar Al Tawash, yesterday. "It is a small, friendly country where people practise their religion and therefore usually, respect other people's religion. He had no personal experience of "racism or discrimination against our religion".
Dr Saeed Salem, chairman of the centre's project committee, and the man who secured £5 million to build it from the oil rich vice ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Hamdan AlMaktoum, is registrar in charge of the hepatitis unit at Beaumont hospital.
He is typical of the new generation of Muslim professionals from Pakistan, the Middle East, the Gulf countries and Africa who choose to settle here. Dr Moosajee Bhamjee, the South African psychiatrist who sits in the Dail as a Labour deputy for Clare, is another.
The large mosque at the heart of the Islamic Cultural Centre is the seventh in Ireland. The others are at the old Islamic centre in Dublin's South Circular Road, Ballyhaunis in Co Mayo, which has a dwindling number of Muslims following the rundown of Mr Sher Rafique's meat plant, Belfast, Cork, Galway and Limerick.
The South Circular Road mosque will be maintained to serve the large number of Muslims who live in the area. There are plans to build a Muslim secondary school on the site when pupil numbers warrant it.
The community is particularly proud of its national school, which opened with two teachers and 40 pupils in the South Circular Road in 1990 and now has seven teachers and 206 pupils.
But the principal, Mr Colm McGlade, is anxious that the Department of Education should provide an extra teacher to deal with the problems of a pupil body 60 per cent of whom do not have English as a first language. Some might be struggling with as many as four languages, speaking, for example, Urdu or Malay at home, English in the street and learning Irish and Arabic at school.
Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown County Council has stipulated as part of granting planning permission for the Clonskeagh centre that there should be no "call to prayer" broadcast five times a day by loudspeaker from the centre's minaret, as is traditional in most mosques.