Ignoring the real segregation in Dublin

The row over school places rumbles on. It's turned into something of a row on racism, an issue sure to trigger middle-class angst.
The problem, as I talked about here last week, is that catholic schools in parts of the Dublin region are full and the schools have taken to giving preference to catholic children.
In some areas this has left some immigrant children stranded without school places. The children, we are given to believe, are mainly of black African ethnicity who are protestants and non-Christians I presume.
So with the spectre of racism hanging in the air, my argument that churches have a perfect right to run their own schools seems to support, in the end, the segregation of children by race. This terrible vista is held up in order to argue for a tightening of the grip of the State on schools.
I smell a lot of something here and it's not roses. In fact, it's stuff you can put on roses to make them grow bigger.
Although race is held up as a terrible division in human society, in fact it's only a minor problem. Race never poses, and has never posed, any problems for any society without one small poisonous ingredient.
Poverty.
So look around this fair city. We already have segregation. If you open your eyes this winter you will see children perished with the cold and undernourished heading to school. You'll see record numbers in the grind schools.
You can read the reports and the league tables. The school you go to largely determines your prospects. There are areas in this town where more of our young people end up in prison than end up in university. I've spoken to social workers and truancy officers and guards and they will tell through gritted teeth that they would be confident enough to go into a bookie and bet on which four-year-old will end up doing smack or doing time.
Our city is segregated by housing estate, by school, by pub, by church, by street.
And all of this, all of it, predates the arrival of blacks, or Poles, or anyone else.
So when our chattering classes get their knickers in a twist over black children ending up in schools of their own and the need for integration - what they mean is that they are worried that the black children will end up in schools with the white underclass that we have already given up on. And if you lie down with dogs...
These are not simple problems. Every parent is duty bound to do the best for their children. Increasingly parents will seek to keep their children out of mediocre performing schools where there are discipline problems, or overcrowding, or bad teachers, or whatever. They are trying to do the best for their kids.
But when we all do this we leave some children behind. And this usually happens on a poverty fault line. If the poor happen to be immigrants then that's where the fault line will show up but race is not the fundamental problem.
The answer lies where it always has lain. In the 1916 Proclamation read out by Padraig Pearse on the steps of the GPO we promised to "cherish all the children of the nation equally". We've made progress but really it's a promise we never kept.
If we treated every Dublin child the way we should, we wouldn't have to worry about what race they are.