Ignorance and poverty add to racial tensions in Dublin

Kola Ojewale got a menacing letter this week stating that "black niggers and scum" like him were not welcome on Parnell Street, where he runs the Infinity Ventures shop. It was damaged last weekend in a disturbance on the street, which has become an African enclave within Dublin's deprived north inner city.

The handwritten letter, purporting to be from the street's residents, says: "We have every right to take yous black niggers out of this street yous have no say here and never will while we have power to put you basters [sic] in your place, and its not a window that will be broken, its your Black Heads."

It goes on to accuse Kola, a Nigerian, and his fellow Africans of being "gangsters and robbers", carrying AIDS and "bringing your monkey looking children the [sic] look like chimps in prams".

Standing in his shop beside its now replaced windows, Kola says he doesn't know whether to dismiss the letter or to report it to the Garda. It is not the first threatening letter he has received at the shop, which was targeted by arsonists last January.

"I don't know an African-owned shop that hasn't been attacked," he says. "The owner of a shop on Dorset Street has a bunch of letters like this."

Mr Ojewale had hoped that tensions arising out of last Sunday night's violence between Africans and customers from the Blue Lion pub opposite would quietly die down. He has since had a cordial meeting with the pub's owner, Martin Kelly, who says the incident was just a "clash between drunken yobs on both sides".

But it will take more than a handshake between African and Irish business people to overcome the tension between ethnic communities and locals.

The north inner city has been culturally transformed by the arrival of asylum-seekers and refugees in the past three years. Several African-owned shops have sprung up on Parnell Street and Dorset Street, stocking imported products ranging from dried cow skin and plantains to skin-lightening creams and hairpieces.

Parnell Street is the hub of the African community, with one hairdresser's and three Nigerian grocery stores. A Nigerian-run restaurant beside the Blue Lion has recently closed.

Infinity Ventures is as much a lively social club as a retail outlet, with people coming and going at all hours to stock up on fresh spinach, get a haircut, make an international phone call, play pool in the back room, or just chat.

Most African men do not even attempt to drink in local pubs, so instead they congregate on the street. Mr Kelly says people feel threatened by this "loitering" and the gardai should stop groups of men gathering on the footpaths.

Many locals from neighbouring Summerhill, who have lived through decades of State neglect, heroin infestation and endemic crime, are suspicious of their African neighbours and resent their apparent wealth.

"People are saying how are they able to open shops when they are refugees and yet they have bleeding mobile phones, brand new cars and Gucci suits," says one man.

"Why don't they [the State] look after our own first?" asks a neatly dressed elderly woman sipping a beer and a Bailey's in a pub on Amiens Street.

A middle-aged woman who lives in the area claimed her daughter, a recovering drug addict with two children, was being housed in a hostel while a Bosnian family was moving into a local authority house. Another man tells a story of a black woman who tried to steal a man's mobile phone in a pub on Amiens Street last weekend.

The racial tension is stoked by countless rumours: that one of the black shops on Parnell Street had put up a "blacks only" sign; that a gang of Nigerians had asked a local pub for protection money; that asylum-seekers are paid £40 more in social welfare each week than Irish people.

Mick Rafferty, a veteran community worker, says locals are ill-equipped to deal with the dramatic, unplanned changes in an already troubled and marginalised area which has its fill of unresolved internal tensions which often lead to violence.

ON the same night as the Parnell Street clashes, a local man was shot dead as he was drinking with a friend outside O'Neill's pub in Summerhill. "For the best part of 20 years, the landlord, which is the corporation, corralled this area of north Dublin so it was like a reservation in which problems developed, and as long as it was kept within the area it was OK," says Mr Rafferty, the director of Community Technical Aid, which is based in Summerhill and provides training and support to struggling communities.

"Now with the property boom and the movement of refugees into the area, it's no longer contained. Ethnic groups are now becoming the new victims of those years of neglect. Sadly, people who have been so long neglected now have another group to blame for their misery."

According to Mr Rafferty, the situation has been fuelled in recent weeks by the almost daily reports of hostility from communities around the State to the Government's forced dispersal of asylum-seekers. "People here read the tabloids and say `Hey, we have had these people for bleedin' years,' " he says.

Politicians have to come out unequivocally and state that they are against racism and the Government's "botched policy", instead of equivocating because they fear alienating their constituents or playing to the gallery by making inflammatory remarks, he adds.

The Inner City Organisations Network, based in Buckingham Street, plans to begin organising meetings between locals and representatives of cultural and refugee groups. It already has a multicultural group and hopes to provide anti-racism training for people involved in work and training projects in the area.

The time is certainly ripe for structured local initiatives. An impromptu anti-racist demonstration was held in Summerhill last month after Abayomi Popoola, a 16-year-old Nigerian asylum-seeker, was severely beaten in a chip shop in Summerhill. Abayomi has had the stitches removed from a cut above his right eye, but his front teeth are broken and he complains of head pains.

The angry protest, which poured onto O'Connell Street, was the first of its kind organised exclusively by asylum-seekers and refugees, who normally prefer to keep a low profile.

Abayomi, who lives in the area, says he is now afraid to walk on his own at night. "It has changed my impression about white people around me," he says. "Before I thought nobody would harm me and I walked around with confidence. But now I am always thinking I could be attacked, injured, killed and I keep looking around me."