A little child who knows quite a lot about racism

Tope recalls hearing her five-year-old speaking in Irish after school, and the memory brings a smile to her face. "Saying Irish in an African accent - that is very funny," she laughs.

However, the other things her daughter comes home with are not so funny.

Tope, a mother of two, is a Nigerian asylum-seeker and has been in Ireland for nearly three years. Her five-year-old daughter Shade started in a school in the north inner city area of Dublin last year.

"She's come home with a lot of things that we know is racism. What she doesn't understand is why children as young as that can say things to her like `why is it that people in Africa don't wear clothes?' "

It disturbs Tope that other children have come to her saying: "My mummy says I shouldn't play with you."

"She comes home and tells me all these things like `Carrie won't play with me' - because Carrie's mum says she shouldn't play with Shade." Last year there was another black child in the class. But that child has not returned to school this year, so now Shade is on her own. "The first day she went back to school, at lunchtime she was by herself," Tope explains, "Nobody else had lunch with her. She ate all by herself in the playground. "And when she came home she said `I was all my myself today, nobody was with me in the playground'."

Tope's sympathy for her child's predicament caused her to go to school the following day to talk to the teacher. The teacher said she would address the issue and find somebody to go out to her in the playground and play with her.

However, Tope says she believes this is unrealistic. "you can't say to a five-year-old: `Will you go out to her and play with her? "

Sure enough, the next day, after school, when Tope asked her daughter whom she had played with that day, Shade named the head teacher.

"I say it is the people's tough luck if they won't play with her. She's not losing out. They are losing out."

Luckily for Shade, she likes to play alone and is cherished at home - which, Tope says, "plays a bigger part to her than what is happening in the school". Her parents are extra nice to Shade, Tope says, to make up for what happens during school hours.

Tope believes Irish parents are responsible for influencing their children with racist opinion. Unfortunately, Tope says, this means that Shade will learn about racism sooner than the average child.

Already the child is beginning to perceive that there are two different sets of people: black and white. "She doesn't see people as the one," Tope says. Whether the realisation of racism will hurt Shade or not, Tope says, "depends on how we bring the point home to her".

"I think it's up to parents at home, teaching their children, and letting them know." Tope is aware that some parents are very narrow-minded and pass it down to their children. "I don't know when it's going to change. It's a very wide subject. I think we should just conclude it."

Tope never expected her child to be on the receiving end of racism here, because the white people in Nigeria are so nice, she says. Here, she says, racism is everywhere.

However, Tope says she believes it is centred mainly in the less well-off classes of Irish people, who she says are uneducated about racism and hence feel threatened by immigrants. She says she doesn't see how "someone who is educated or who has travelled widely or who has been in classes with black people could be so bitter about seeing blacks". She doesn't expect life to be any different for her younger daughter, who was born in Ireland, when she starts school in a few years. "It doesn't make any difference," she says. "Black is black at the end of the day."

Names have been changed to protect the identity of those involved. `Tope' also declined to be photographed.