Madam, - I was brought up in Ballymun and lived there for the first 21 years of my life. My mother and younger siblings still live there. While visiting my mother last weekend, my wife and I decided to take our young sons to a local park.
There my wife had to endure racial taunts from a number of young children aged between nine and 12.
She is British, of Chinese origin. We have never experienced anything like this in the 11 years that we have been together, even when we lived in the roughest areas of Glasgow. These taunts progressed to open aggression and a number of objects were thrown in our direction. Anyone could plainly see that my wife was carrying our three-month-old baby in a harness.
There was no supervisor in this park and it appears that it has become an area for idle yobs to hang around in.
When leaving the park, I managed to flag down a Garda patrol car. I told the gardaí what had happened and they said they would investigate; but I got the distinct feeling that they did not care, and they quickly drove away without offering to take me back to the park to point the culprits out.
To add insult to injury, as we walked back to my mother's home my wife was sexually propositioned using racist language by a number of four- and five-year-old children.
Is this the behaviour that some Irish parents teach their kids? What is being done to teach children about the many other races who now visit Ireland and settle here? It seems as if Ballymun has become a ghetto for a white Catholic "underclass" whose parents are full of resentment towards immigrants which they are passing on to their children.
I feel sorry for these children. I was lucky: I managed to further my education and escape. Most of the people I went to school with in Ballymun are now dead from either drugs or suicide, or in prison, and this is what, I fear, awaits the children we encountered. - Yours, etc,
TIREOGHAIN O'BUADHAIGH, Tuam Road, Galway.