Mary Robinson has a deeply personal stake in the Durban race conference, at which participants will include prominent world figures such as Dr Fidel Castro and Mr Yasser Arafat. The Irish poet and Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney, is among eight goodwill ambassadors for the summit, the first global anti-racism conference of the post-apartheid era.

The UN conference will open next Friday with a ceremony including African ballet, and end a week later with delegates from some 200 countries signing a common declaration and programme of action to eradicate racism.

Many words have been exchanged about the event, most of them bitter. Inter-state stand-offs over sensitive issues like the Middle East, along with calls for apologies and reparations for slavery and colonialism, have dominated preparatory meetings. Progress on resolving such contentious matters in the two draft documents has been made, but it has been painfully slow.

Finding ways to solve the many historical grievances has meant less time for fine-tuning measures to tackle contemporary racism. Mrs Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has called for an action-orientated, forward-looking summit, but the past has largely dominated the agenda until now.

With less than a week before the conference opens, the political posturing continues with a US threat to boycott the event over Islamic states' demands for Israel's treatment of Palestinians to be condemned as racial discrimination.

The US boycotted the two previous world conferences against racism in 1978 and 1983 in support of Israel. UN officials expect the US to attend, but it may downgrade its delegation, which was due to be headed by the Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell.

On the domestic front preparations for the conference have been soured by anger among refugee lobby groups over the plan by the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr O'Donoghue, to stop off in Nigeria on his way to the conference to sign an agreement aimed at speeding up deportations of failed asylum-seekers.

Such domestic and global controversies aside, what relevance does such a lofty-sounding event as a World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance have for a Congolese refugee in Tallaght who faces daily taunts of "nigger, go home" or the Romanian restaurant owner in Dublin who has had to virtually barricade his premises to defy ongoing racist attacks?

Is an international gathering at which states from Iran to the Vatican City have to reach a common position not destined to be one of symbolism over substance?

Ms Carol Baxter, policy officer with the National Women's Council, which sent a delegation to the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, says such global events are indeed important.

"They put the spotlight on issues," she says. "Yes, it's a jamboree, but it brings the Government to an international arena and makes it justify what it has done, if anything."

Last year's five-year review of the Beijing conference provided "a hook" for the Government to commit to drawing up a national action plan on women, says Ms Baxter. This plan, due to be issued shortly, gives renewed impetus to Government Departments to take women's issues seriously, she adds.

Organisations campaigning against racism in Ireland say a coherent national action plan against racism would be a valuable outcome from Durban.

"We would hope the conference would give an added impetus to existing measures and also act as a catalyst for new measures," says Mr Philip Watt from the Government advisory body, the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism.

"Racist crime has to be among the priorities because people are experiencing crimes of hate."

Irish lobby groups recognise progress in recent years, including the establishment of equality bodies, a Human Rights Commission, the Garda Racial and Intercultural Office and the recent ratification of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

Gardai are close to agreeing a working definition of a racial crime, but until this is in place racial incidents are not officially recorded. Incitement-to-hatred laws, which have been criticised as ineffective, have not yet been replaced.

These shortcomings were recently criticised by Amnesty International, which has been the Government's most vocal critic in the run-up to the Durban conference.

In a controversial advertising campaign last May, Amnesty accused senior politicians of failing to show leadership against racism. While the Government dithers, racism has been taking hold, it charged.

Recent EU research discovered almost a fifth of people in Ireland found the presence of people from another nation disturbing in their daily lives. In recent months racist websites advocating an all-white Ireland have sprung up, although gardai closed down two of them this week.

Amnesty urgently called for the start of the £4.5 million three-year national antiracism public awareness campaign, sanctioned 18 months ago. The campaign is due to be launched on October 17th.

Mr Jim Loughran, the development manager with Amnesty's Irish section, says Government policies and practices stemming from Durban need to be coherent and "measured against their ability to make a tangible difference to people's lives."

Irish non-governmental organisations attending Durban say the occasion will provide them with a valuable chance to lobby, network and learn from other delegates. While they want Government action, they also say the value of words and common moral understandings at such events should not be underestimated.

Even before they go to Durban, Traveller representatives have something to be pleased about. For the first time in any UN international documents, they will be named along with Roma and Sinti as a distinct group facing racism in the declaration to be agreed at Durban.

This was achieved through effective lobbying by them and committed work by Irish and Finnish officials at a European preparatory conference for the world summit in Strasbourg last October.

"Often racism has been understood in terms of colour rather than ethnicity and culture so this recognition is really important," says Ronnie Fay from Pavee Point, the Travellers' Support Group that will be sending representatives to Durban.

When officials get down to talking after next Friday's pomp and circumstance, they will have a lot of ground to cover to reach a consensus. Some 71 out of 131 paragraphs of the common declaration remain to be agreed as well as up to 150 commitments in the programme of action.

"It's a tall order," said one Irish official involved in the conference. "It's not impossible, but it will require fairly major compromises on all sides."