Archbishop Ryan National School's roll call reads like a Benetton ad script, but its rich ethnic mix faces language difficulties, Ruadhán MacCormaicreports in his continuing series.
It asks a lot of the imagination to picture the scene at some 20 years' remove. But when Tadhg O'Donoghue first put his feet under the principal's desk at Archbishop Ryan National School in Balgaddy, west Dublin, his window gave a view over what was still one of the city's borderlands, neither provincial nor wholeheartedly suburban.
It was 1985 and the enrolment list that year ran to eight lines. Most of the pupils lived in Foxdene, the new council estate the school was built to serve, and a few others came from the houses scattered across the rolling farmland that still coloured the landscape.
O'Donoghue recalls that in the late 1980s a prominent developer, seeing potential where others saw fields, took a gamble and spent £1 million on a new road that would unlock new land for private housing in the area. But the demand never arose and realising this, the builder brought the project to a halt before it had finished.
For years the stretch of tarmac stood untouched, half-built and leading to nowhere. "Just goes to show you how things have changed," says O'Donoghue.
What temporal thread connects then and now is hard to make out. Foxdene's 200 houses are still standing, but on all sides the school is enveloped by concrete: bright new apartments to left and right, and private estates running all the way through to Lucan to the west.
Not far from here are the council estates of north Clondalkin. There, the rates of poverty and unemployment are still double, in some places triple, those elsewhere in the city, but the stereotypes of 15 years ago don't have the currency they did.
As the first generations have grown up and moved on, the population has levelled out (there are about 18,000 people in its four districts) and a drive through the estates shows how the trappings of recent money (new cars, modified houses, more trees) are the same here as everywhere else.
Tall, new buildings intrude on the northern skyline towards the Galway road: an industrial estate, an elegant glass-fronted hotel and the Liffey Valley shopping centre. In Balgaddy, a great number of the new houses are owned by investors and rented by recent immigrants.
At Archbishop Ryan junior national school, these changes are reflected within. In 20 years the school's numbers have risen from eight to 560, and today approximately 50 per cent of the children are from ethnic minority backgrounds.
The visitor is greeted by a large map of the world adorned with an Irish tricolour, and the walls of the bright corridors are decorated with lavish displays given over to 34 different countries, each one represented in the classrooms here. In his office, O'Donoghue is working his way through a list of applications for next year (208 children for 125 places), the names on the page reading like a script for a Benetton ad: Weronika, Daire, Krzysztof, Winnie, Seán, Jakub, Gusté, Kennedy, Fraest, Promise, Osas, Faye, Ciara, Karolina.
Staff and children are absorbed in preparations for the school's annual Intercultural Week, where for five days they'll down pencils and immerse themselves in a celebration of the ethnic montage their school has become.
The week is a reminder of how much has happened in the past 20 years, for when change is constant, says O'Donoghue, you tend to stop noticing. He hears principals talk of the "new challenges" of having to deal with children who don't speak English, when they have been dealing with them here for seven or eight years.
The school has been enriched by its diversity and the dynamic it has spawned, says O'Donoghue. But language is the terrain on which most difficulties arise.
On the morning I visit, two African children - a 10-year-old and a younger sibling - had arrived at the door. Nobody recognised them. O'Donoghue checked with the senior school, but staff there knew nothing of the pair either. 'Where are you from?' O'Donoghue asked. A one-word response - "Ireland" - and their vocabulary was exhausted. After making a few calls around the area, he eventually found out which school was theirs. A relative had dropped them off at the wrong one.
"A parent coming in to enrol a child - it's with great difficulty that we do it. It could take quite a while in the office. Trying to find out what age the child is, for one. Sometimes they'll come in and the child might only be born and you have to say: 'sorry, we don't take children here until they're four'."
Dealing with parents who speak no English is a daily feat of improvisation, a ritual of slowly-delivered syllables and elaborate hand gestures. If a Russian woman comes to enrol her child, the help of a compatriot in senior infants might be enlisted to bridge the linguistic gap.
Because of its high international pupil ratio, the school currently has three English language support teachers and has been offered a fourth. There are difficulties, says O'Donoghue, but he thinks the school has coped well.
Involvement among Irish and immigrant parents is high, and the school's Catholic ethos has caused few problems: parents are told they can take their children out while religion is being taught, but so far the only one who did was an Irish Jehovah's Witness.
There have been unexpected payoffs, as well: when an inspector visited last year, he found that the children born to foreign parents were particularly strong at Irish. "They don't have any of the hang-ups the Irish parents have, and a lot of them already speak at least two languages already," says one teacher.
Around the area, people speak reluctantly about perceptions of racism, but according to Lucy Peprah of the Clondalkin Partnership, relations between Irish and immigrant neighbours are less problematic than they were.
"There's been a huge improvement," she said. "People from the Irish community are now standing up. Three years ago, if somebody came out and said something [ racist], an Irish person might just shake his head in disapproval. Now they tend to say something. They'll speak up."
Acclimatising to the new environment is a bigger question for immigrant parents to grapple with, Peprah believes. Her role casts her in the position of cultural mediator: she has had to explain to parents, for instance, why corporal punishment is unacceptable, and to tell teachers why some African children will never look them in the face ("culturally, they dare not").
"I had one parent who wouldn't deal with a principal because she was a woman. He wanted to deal with a man. There was nothing to do: that's her position. I told him: 'This is how things are in Ireland, so you have to deal with it.' He talked to her in the end. But it took a month."
Parents from west Africa, she observes, have different expectations of a system that is considerably less "aggressive" than their own.
"Their kind of education system is purely academic, based on exam results, learning from memory. Here, the system is different. When children go into junior infants, they are nurtured: they are encouraged to draw, to play.
"In some countries, it's not like that: by the time a child is in senior infants they know their multiplication tables. When the academic year started, I got a lot of parents complaining. 'What's happening? The children are not doing anything.' They say, 'my son came home and he has been given a page to colour in. This is not good enough. It's gone on for a whole month.'"
Some draw less encouragement from their experience of the school system than others. Rory McDaid, who works as an English language support teacher at St Gabriel's national school in Dublin's north inner city, reiterates the ways in which ethnic minority children have benefited the school system.
However, he regrets that schools with large numbers of children with no English are having to improvise, to feel their way in the dark through an area that he feels has been given little thought by the State.
It is estimated that there are more than 28,000 students in Irish schools who do not have English as a first language, and though language and training material provided by Integrate Ireland Language and Training provides a good framework, McDaid says, some teachers are still using self-made material or work downloaded from the internet.
"There is no central co-ordinating unit within the Department of Education looking after this . . . I would argue that there should be a specific group. You're talking about putting three or four people in charge of this, devising resources and coming up with strategies around these ethnic minority language kids."
The issue is larger than language. McDaid believes there is a form of "institutional racism" in the school system: schoolbooks reflect only one culture, he argues, and there are very few ethnic minority teachers.
Failure to learn from mistakes made elsewhere, or to remedy problems as soon as they arise, he warns, increases the risk that some will fall out of the system later on.
"There's no doubt about it, that we are building up another level of disadvantage. When we talk about disadvantage in Ireland at the moment, we're talking about socio-economic disadvantage.
"Over the next while, these people will be disadvantaged because of their ethnic status or their language base."