IMAGINE if Clondalkin had a communist mayor and a quarter of its population came from north and west Africa, the Caribbean and south east Asia.
That's the situation in Stains, a town of 35,000 people in the "red zone" of northern Paris. Apart from its left wing politics and its 39 nationalities, Stains shares most of the problems of marginalised Dublin suburbs like north Clondalkin, west Tallaght and Ballymun.
By French standards it has an extremely high unemployment rate of over 20 per cent. Its largest high rise housing estate has a feel of Ballymun at its worst: vandalised shops and flats; evil smelling basement; squats; sinister, rubble strewn passageways.
The main difference is that, this being Paris, the clever Left Bank architect who designed the estate decided that what working class people needed to brighten their lives was dramatic colours and shapes. So the tower blocks are garishly multi coloured and the central edifice weaves across the estate like a monstrous snake.
Otherwise the Stains housing estates, or cite's as they are called in France, have the same large numbers of single mothers; families endlessly behind with their rent; easy access to drugs, including heroin and "crack"; and violent clashes between teenage gangs.
It was not always like this. When the communists and socialists first took over the running of this solidly working class suburb in the mid 1930s, it was turning into something of a model for similar communities throughout France.
From the 1920s on, the central area was laid out as a "garden city", one of the first in the country. There is still a network of tree and flower lined streets of small villas and low rise apartments, now largely inhabited by old people, which gives vivid witness to the dream of an earlier generation of idealists who believed that poorer people too had a right to "inherit the earth".
That dream started to die with the arrival of long term unemployment after the 1974 oil price rise crisis. It effectively ended with the defeat of Mitterrand's first "broad left" government in the mid 1980s.
Stains is now one of that ring of socially deprived towns around Paris - dramatised in the film La Haine - which have both high unemployment and a high immigrant population: 22.5 per cent of Stains's citizens are classified as foreigners, while the national average is 6.3 per cent.
Because of this melting pot atmosphere, it was only a matter of time before Jean Marie Le Pen's far right National Front arrived. Last year the Front, with its simplistic and racist "immigrants go home" message, won five seats on the town council.
In Le Moulin Neuf, a small estate with a majority North African population, the political problems of the town's left wing council are of little concern to a group of community workers. Their parents came to France decades years ago from Algeria, Morocco and the Ivory Coast.
They are concerned mainly about two intimately related problems: how to prevent their young people from falling into the dreadful spiral of unemployment, hopelessness, drug use, and crime and how to give them a sense of dignity and self worth as teenagers caught between parents from a foreign, usually North African and Muslim culture, and the indifference, even hostility, of mainstream French society.
"Ten years ago when I was growing up I had great hope for the future. I wanted to work, to study, to travel," says Nadera Ouaissa, a strikingly blond, dark eyed young Algerian woman who is one of the leaders of a local community association. "Now the future does not exist for our young people. They live from day to day."
She says when she was a teenager she never knew about drugs; now even eight to 10 year olds know where to get them, and the old friendliness between the estates has broken down as drug dealers have carved out territories.
She talks about the problems young North Africans face when looking for work. Her elder brother is that rare thing: an Algerian who has reached the top of a prestigious French profession. But he was turned down the first time he applied to the Sorbonne university to do a doctorate in law. He re applied using a friends' more respectable address, and now works for a top Paris firm.
"I came here when I was nine years old from Algeria, reading and writing only Arabic. Now I'm more French than the French. I speak French better than most of them. I dress like a young French woman. This is my country. I want to live here, work here, die here. But I shouldn't have to give up my Algerian origins or culture to do so," Nadern says.
She and her friend Ouahiba Teldja are examples of the kind of dynamic young leaders, many of them women, one finds these days in immigrant communities. Ouahiba is part of a group of actors, community workers and young people who will next month perform a play in a prestigious Paris theatre about the dreams, hopes and violence of a "cite" like theirs.
Few of these young people see the point in voting, let alone becoming involved in politics.
The deputy mayor, Azzedine Taibi, himself the Communist son of Algerian parents, admits that most deprived young people in Stains are "disgusted" with the political parties, whether of the left or right, because they appear to have little relevance to the cite's.