How do you teach a class of 30 children when 10 of them don't speak English? Or conduct a parent-teacher meeting with adults who have spent decades in a refugee camp? Ruadhán Mac Cormaic meets staff, parents and pupils at St Mark's Junior National School, in Tallaght, where one in three children is foreign
"Diversity is a strength," affirms the large poster that hangs at a child's eye level and still manages to dominate the building's main entrance hall. Above it, a yellow-and-blue "Welcome" is rendered in 16 languages. To the left and right, the long corridors that lead to the school's 20 classrooms are decorated with the lavish brush strokes of children's artwork, their signatures inscribed in letters larger than the houses they depict: Xin Nan, Salum, Abdul, Nicole, Destiny, Aoife, Alberto, John, Nikita, Asalam, Ileana, Eoin, Declan, Ella, Aishat, Blessing, Jamie. In the senior-infants corridor hangs a huge laminated map of the world with 23 coloured tacks pressed through it, one for every nation represented here. "Where in the world do you come from?" it asks.
St Mark's Junior National School, in Springfield, Tallaght, revels in its cosmopolitanism. When the current principal, Ann Ryan, took over, in 1998, the roll-call listed 11 international pupils. Today, 185 of a total 525 fall into that category. More than one in three children in every class is foreign.
"We're like the United Nations here," says Ryan. "I'm hugely supportive of diversity. And I know some people will say: 'Yeah, but . . .' There is no 'but' for me. The reality is tough, but, as far as I'm concerned, we're benefiting from this."
Springfield has always been a marker of change. When the estate of some 2,000 privately-owned houses was built, in the early 1970s, it marked Tallaght's first foray westwards from the old village. You reach it by following the old Blessington road, which skirts the southern side of the Square shopping centre, a route that in 1970 wound its way through open fields and today links the sprawling estates of Jobstown, Killinarden, Fettercairn and Brookfield. Tallaght may be bigger than Limerick, its population soon to overtake Galway's, but it still hunkers under the weight of old emblems, most of them informed by those expanses of concrete wilderness, barely settled before they had become case studies in urban non-planning and the social whirlwind which that entailed in the 1980s: high unemployment, high crime rates, low prospects.
If the truest picture of Tallaght incorporates 20 shades of grey, Springfield itself straddles two starkly contrasting views of the place. At its western fringe are some of the poorest areas in Dublin. But look the other way, towards Tallaght's hospital and the Square, and the horizon is studded with tall cranes, new hotels, apartment complexes and all the gleaming ornaments of newly-minted wealth. By the time the house-price boom rolled around in the 1990s, Springfield's first generation of children had already left home, and many original owners had cashed in and moved on. A few years' lull ensued. But with rising immigration and a growing need for private rented housing late in the decade, it was not long before the overgrown hedges were trimmed and the swings began to sway once more. Springfield - the designation has come to include the nearby estates of Raheen and Virginia Heights - now has one of the highest international populations in Dublin.
These shifting tides have given St Mark's Junior National School a profile that confounds tidy categorisation. Officially, the school is not in a disadvantaged area, although the same is not true of the local community school, which it feeds. And yet a survey carried out by St Mark's last year found that between 30 and 40 per cent of parents were unemployed. "We're in a little pocket in the middle of a surrounding area of west Tallaght where there would be extreme disadvantage," says Ann Ryan. "The Celtic Tiger has raised all boats on its tide, but it's all relative."
The shifts may have been rapid, but for the school, the effects are deeply set. The dynamic has been overturned in ways that staff are still trying to tease out, and although the school now defines itself according to its positive qualities, new challenges abound. In the staffroom, enthusiasm is tempered by the strains of a project for which they have no model. For one, most international children speak no English when they arrive.
On the day I visit, the school has taken in its first pupil from Tibet. "She arrived this morning," says Ryan, "and I said: 'Hello, what's your name?' She said her name, and I thought, Oh, this is wonderful, she speaks English. No, her father said, she just knows that everyone says 'What's your name?' She has one word. The reality is tough on a teacher who has a class of 30 children, and 10 of them don't speak English as their first language," says Ryan.
Although the Department of Education and Science funds some language support - schools are entitled to one English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teacher per 15 international students - there is a cap, which means that St Mark's has only three temporary ESL teachers for 185 pupils. The school's unique situation also means that it falls into a black hollow between official categories. Ironically, the school would be much better off were it officially disadvantaged. "We've fallen between two stools. If a majority of our international children are in need of social welfare, and a good number of our indigenous Irish population are, then we should be receiving more than your standard school in a middle-class area in Killiney or Foxrock."
The grievance is echoed by a local TD, Charlie O'Connor, who lives in Springfield and recently brought the new ambassador of Lesotho, Mannete Ramaili, to see the school. "I know she was very impressed. That day they brought out all their international children to meet her, and it was just amazing. They've coped remarkably well, and the community is responding, but I do feel very strongly that they should get some special designation."
With the help of the Tallaght Partnership, the school has drawn up some multilingual leaflets to introduce parents to the school. And when a new cohort of junior infants arrives, all parents are invited to a private meeting with Ryan. "For 80 per cent of parents, that's a straightforward visit, but for some women it's the first contact they've had with someone other than from their own culture or religion. So you're conducting a conversation in a language that is alien to them. You're doing sign, you're doing gesture, you're doing a lot of smiling, because you want to make them feel welcome."
One of the parents, Yvonne Nnadozie, came to Ireland from Nigeria four years ago. After spending some time in Lucan, she recently settled in Tallaght with her two daughters, the eldest of whom, Chidera, started at St Mark's this September. "Before I arrived, I heard a couple of stories about how bad Tallaght is, but ever since I moved in, I've never seen anything bad," says Nnadozie. She has known racist abuse, she says, but incidents are relatively few.
"I've not had problems in Springfield. Once in a while you come across it, but it's a normal thing having to come into a place where you're not a part of them. You feel it, that they're trying to get used to you, and you're trying to get used to them. If it's two out of 10 people, that's okay. It becomes a problem to me when it's eight out of 10. I can only get bothered if the kids are not comfortable, but my daughter has not had any complaints, so that's okay."
With her daughter now settled at school - "She has always loved Irish dance; she's going to be happy to learn it now" - Nnadozie is hoping to train as a nurse and strengthen her involvement in the locality. "I have a positive attitude to Ireland, and I want to go into a profession where I should be able to put in a lot for the community. And I hope my children stay here. Where would they be going?"
The need to adapt is one felt by staff at St Mark's, too. According to Edwina Cahill, who co-ordinates the school-completion programme in the area, teachers have had to attune themselves to new sets of religious and cultural sensibilities. "The most interesting one I had was last year, when a parent raised it with me. You know the way,if you were chastising a child, you'd say: 'Look at me when I'm speaking to you'? That's very disrespectful in some African countries. So I said it to the teachers. Also, some of the children eat so late at night, and they eat an awful lot of carbs, so they're not hungry when we have our lunchtime, and we expect them to eat. Things like that, we're only learning."
Another teacher remembers the first time a Muslim man refused to shake her hand. "It felt like a slap in the face," she says. And when the school organised English-language classes for parents, a second class had to be hastily cobbled together when some mothers politely whispered that they couldn't sit in the same class as the men.
In the classroom, the international pupils appear to be deliberately dispersed among the Irish children, to encourage them to mix. Do they? "There are no problems with the kids," says Ryan. "Kids don't see colour; parents do. You'll occasionally get a parent who'll come in and say, 'My child is afraid of black children,' but I have no tolerance of that. You'd better get your child over that fear very quickly. By and large, they go out there and they all play. But we would have a very active policy of anti-bullying, and, within that, racism and any type of racist remark is dealt with under the blanket of bullying, because it is just another form of bullying.
"What is not easy for me is that my parameter stops at the gate. And I would sometimes have parents come in with an issue - and it wouldn't just be about race - that I can't deal with because it's not inside the gate. I've had two quite serious racial complaints, but both of them had happened outside the school."
Alhough St Mark's is more than 30 years old, a major renovation of the building in 2001 left nothing but the walls intact. They're now freshly painted, and the new furniture, the upgraded computers and the clean pastel blues, greens and yellows all give off a feeling of vitality and renewal that chimes nicely with the mood.
In the run-up to Halloween, the school will hold its annual arts week, when academic work is suspended for five days of singing, dancing, storytelling and unbridled bedlam. Poets and local authors will drop by, the old walls will shake to the thumps of African drummers and the corridors will carry the reels of an afternoon céilí, before the teachers dress up, too, and the children feast on something peculiar to their own culture.
Ostensibly it's an important fundraiser - as Ryan points out, "no one in the department is going to ring you up and say: 'God, girl, I hear you've 185 internationals, what can we do for you?' " But the event, as the staff well know, is also a showcase of their achievement. For all the problems, the celebration of diversity is more than a mantra. There is a sense that this is the forefront of all that is changing - in Springfield, in Tallaght and beyond - and there's something thrilling about the unpredictability of these heady days, adrift of precedent, bereft of maps and managing to get by all the same.
"Look around," says Ryan. "What's happening is positive. It brings geography to life, history to life, culture to life. We have new costumes, new hairstyles, new foods. Our school is a multilayered, multicoloured place where we're all learning about each other and about how much we have in common. I'd have to say that we've learned more about ourselves and our own sense of identity, too. Because you're awash with other cultures, you start thinking, what's mine? In an average class in this school, you'll have a child just in from Nigeria, maybe another in from Tibet. She can't tell you about it yet, but she will. It's just so mind-broadening for them. It's tough, but this is an exciting place to work."