I had the good fortune last Tuesday to be able to attend a Round Table on Education and Integration, organised by the Immigrant Council of Ireland.
This brought together 30 people involved with this issue from NGOs, academia and some public authorities.
It is impressive how much study is now being devoted to immigration and, in particular, to the education issue.
First of all, how big is this problem?
If we omit British and US children (interestingly, US nationals are more prolific than any other group - in 2006 no less than 27 per cent of US citizens here were under 20 years of age), the proportion of children among immigrants is barely half that in our indigenous population.
As a result, less than 6 per cent of the children in our schools have a language other than English as their primary language.
Yet that still involves about 40,000 immigrant children, who tend to be concentrated in particular cities and towns, and who in a few schools actually outnumber children of indigenous parents. By contrast, very many rural schools have had no experience whatever of immigrant students.
These 40,000 immigrant students come from a wide variety of divergent cultures, and have scores of different languages as their primary means of communication.
Thus, many urban schools face extremely complex cultural and linguistic issues. Our immigrants are also socially very mixed. Some come from poor backgrounds and their parents have very little education. At the same time, in the 2006 Census, 40 per cent recorded themselves as having completed third-level education.
This cultural, linguistic and social mix poses a huge challenge to teachers in those schools which cater for a significant number of immigrant children.
This is complicated by the fact that some of these children are resentful at having been torn away by their parents from their own environment and their friends. This is particularly true of those who come to Ireland as teenagers.
In some cases their mothers fail to learn English, and thus cannot help their children with their school work.
In fact, relations between immigrant students and their parents are sometimes aggravated by the relative ease with which many of their children learn English and adapt to Irish culture yet their parents may find this much more difficult to do.
Moreover, in inner city areas some immigrant parents come from cultures where parents exercise stricter discipline than is nowadays normal here. This disciplinary differential can inhibit immigrant children's social involvement, for example in youth clubs.
A distinct problem is that of children born here but who are visibly different ethically. These children, who naturally feel themselves Irish, become irritated when repeatedly asked, often by well-meaning people: "Where do you come from?"
Although many immigrant children acquire English quickly, and although research has shown that many of them are ambitious, hard-working and polite, teachers facing the arrival of a significant number of such children can find the psychological tensions around immigration quite traumatic.
This is understandable, as teacher training has not in the past done anything to prepare them for this new situation.
Especially difficult for them are inter-ethnic rows which are bound to break out in the playground between children of different ethnic backgrounds - not just between indigenous and immigrant children, but sometimes between different groups of immigrants. Our training colleges now include courses in the skills needed to deal with the new problems that many teachers face. However, this new training has not been paralleled by in-service courses to help existing teachers to adjust to the new challenges.
Teachers also find it difficult to deal with immigrant parents who have little English and who know nothing of Irish school culture.
Some schools are now providing English teaching for parents after school. Research has shown that many teachers go out of their way to facilitate immigrant children and their parents, staying on after school or coming in on Saturdays.
The dispute several years ago between the Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland, (ASTI) and the Department of Education obscured for many people the extent to which many teachers are deeply committed to their students, and give up much free time in the late afternoon or evening to assist both indigenous and immigrant children.
I wrote in this column last September about the need for English teaching for immigrants to enable many of them to move from menial work to secure jobs in which they could exercise the often very valuable skills they bring with them from their own countries.
Our society would benefit from this, and it is clearly in our interest to provide such courses.
In that article I urged the Minister for Finance to set aside resources for this purpose in his December Budget. He has in fact permitted the Minister for Education to loosen restrictions on the number of teachers of English to immigrants children.
Dr Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin, has been trying to address problems arising from the need to provide for immigrant children who are not Roman Catholic - about half of the total number of immigrants and two-thirds in the case of immigrants from outside Europe.
However, research has shown that accommodating them in Roman Catholic schools may be problematic for both the children and the schools.
There are concerns in some Catholic schools that the influx of non-Catholic children might disturb the ethos of these schools, and one principal has been moved to wonder - humorously - whether there could be such a thing as a "Catholic multi-denominational or non-denominational multi-cultural school".
At the same time, some immigrant parents are mystified, and uncomfortable, with finding their children immersed in a distinctive religious ethos that is alien to them.
The scale and volume of research that has recently been undertaken on these issues is impressive - in particular the work of Dr Dympna Devine of UCD's school of education and lifelong learning.