As the first term at Bracken Educate Together School in Balbriggan ends, Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, Migration Correspondent, finds out how the children, staff and parents have weathered a controversial start to school life

The first girl stands and raises the yellow card for the class to see: it shows the red, white and blue of the Slovakian flag and alongside it the phrase as they'd have it at home. "Veselé Vianoce," she announces, then sits down on the floor. To her left, the Afghan boy repeats the motion, but this time the line is in Pashto. And so the circle is made - in Czech, English, Yoruba, Arabic. Somewhere in the middle, there's a boy called Blessing who lifts his own and reads it with the help of his friend, a Balt. "Nollaig shona."

The "winter holiday" is approaching, and just as they celebrated Eid, the Muslim feast that marks the end of Ramadan, and Diwali, the major festival in Hinduism, earlier in the year, Christmas will be marked by a concert for parents next week, and the group - encompassing second, third, fourth and fifth classes -- are now in final rehearsals. Themes form around common bonds - Santa and snow being the master-nouns - and before the day ends the class is guided through an elaborately choreographed rendition of that paean to the kindly bearded one and his coming to town.

What strikes you, standing in the ground floor room of Sunshine House, a holiday centre belonging to the St Vincent de Paul, is how the children here are so unself-conscious, so comfortable with visitors. But then has any group of children had more reason to get bored by attention than the pupils at Bracken Educate Together, a name still familiar by that discordant prefix: "emergency school".

Late last summer, these pupils' situation became a national talking point when it turned out that there were more children than school-places in fast-growing Balbriggan. With September looming, there were 32 children with nowhere to go, and most of them, as it happened, were the children of immigrants.

Apparently taken by surprise, the Department of Education asked Educate Together, the representative body for multi-denominational schools, to open its second school in the town. And within a fortnight the number of applications had risen more than threefold.

The Balbriggan scenario was a re-enactment of the experience in another part of north Dublin a few weeks earlier. In Diswellstown, Dublin 15, the doors of another "emergency school" run by the Catholic Church, Scoil Choilm, were being opened for the first time to 83 junior infants whose parents came from Nigeria, Colombia, Romania, Poland, Moldova and elsewhere.

Television pictures of one black child after another filing past the gates of Sunshine House set off an anxious debate. "It might be a skin-colour issue, but it's not necessarily a race issue," said Minister for Education Mary Hanafin. "The nature of Irish society is changing. It's particularly changing in some communities."

But even without reducing the cause to race, the outcome was the segregation of ethnic minorities.

Most blamed poor planning. As far back as April last year, according to the latest census, the non-ethnic Irish proportion of Balbriggan's population was above average at 15 per cent, and its black Irish share (6 per cent) was much higher than in any other town. And because of the tendency of new ethnic minorities to move to places where other minorities are already established, the influx of more immigrants to rented housing in Balbriggan was easily foreseeable, critics argued.

Not so, said the Department of Education. What was evident was the trend, not the numbers, and such were the flows of people in and out of the area during the summer that the number of children in need of places doubled in August.

As the first term winds down, Bracken seems to be coping well - albeit in what principal Marian Griffin calls "extreme circumstances." Griffin, who was previously deputy principal at St Oliver Plunkett's National School nearby, took over from the school's acting principal almost two months ago and now oversees a staff of five class teachers (because she is not yet an administrative principal, that includes herself) and the same number of language assistants.

"I'm in my seventh week now, and it's been hard work," she says in her office-cum-staffroom-cum-secretary's-area. "It's been a vertical learning curve . . . We've had to think on our feet really and develop a strategy as we've gone along."

Improvisation is the watchword, in fact, from negotiating different parents' expectations of the system and harnessing the diversity in the classroom to actually giving the temporary building (no land-line phone but complete with chapel and beds in classrooms) the feel of a school.

For the committed young teachers, the sense of feeling their way through unfamiliar terrain makes it an exciting place to work, and Griffin is evidently energised by the experience. "It's so exciting. The typical Irish primary school seems boring to somebody who has been immersed in this. It doesn't feel like December; it doesn't feel like Wednesday," she says.

But what do the parents make of it? Out of Bracken's 83 children, only five have Irish-born parents and for the immigrant parents as much as anyone else, the school's ethnic composition was a worry - even if their unease was tempered by relief at finding a place at all.

"It was the beginning of the school year, so I had to find a school for my children," says Violet Mwenelupembe, originally from Malawi. "I went from one school to another - Catholic, Protestant and everything. There were no places. One school put us on a waiting list, so we kept waiting." Her two children, Twitike (9) and Themba (6), spent the first four weeks of term at home and Mwenelupembe recalls it as a difficult time for the family.

She speaks highly of the staff and their methods, but admits to worry about the scarcity of white faces in the classroom. She regrets, too, that since moving from Dún Laoghaire in late summer she has made few Irish friends, and says the usual sites of exchange with Irish parents - kids' parties, fleeting chats at the school gates - are not open to her.

Mary, an African mother of three, shares the others' relief at finding a school for her son, but the bitter residue of last September's experience lingers. "I bought books for him to study at home in September, so that he would have something to do. He was upset. He was alone," she says. But children are resilient and for her boy September is already a faded memory, Mary says. Not so for her. "I think it's a problem of planning. There's too many households and not enough schools for all those houses. It's stupid. In my country everybody used to be together - Chinese, African, everybody. We used to respect each others' culture and there was no problem."

For all its apparent suddenness, the pressure on schools in Balbriggan has been building steadily for years. Marian Griffin recalls the day in 2002 when, as acting principal at St Oliver's, she called officials to say she had that day turned away 14 children. "They were all immigrants and I felt so sorry for them because they had no schools for their children. It was just terrible.

"It was a situation that evolved, but even though on the outside it might have looked as if people were discriminating, that's how it evolved. As it happens, most of the immigrant people were just newcomers in the area and as a result all the places were already gone. So we saw this problem going back years."

Ask those with an ear to the ground in Balbriggan if they would bet against a recurrence of this autumn's problems next September and few will reach for their pockets. Enrolment lists across town are getting longer every week.

And if there is such pressure on schools here, then what about other parts of outer Dublin where the growth rate has been even more rapid?

For all her misgivings, Violet Mwenelupembe has an optimist's take on things.

"I was worried . . . I thought, what is the point of a school of only immigrants? But now I look back and I feel there's a difference - I expect more children to come in over the next few years. It's not going to be like this forever."