Bigotry has some surprising homes, reports Nuala Haughey onInternational Day against Racism

Even as an effort at undergraduate humour, it was a spectacular failure. A supposedly light-hearted vox pop in a student newspaper at University College Dublin asked six white Irish students which ethnic minority they most hated and why. It was never going to be anything other than offensive.

A first-year science student chose Afghans, because "the Americans should have done a better job taking them out over there". Another picked Bosnians, because "they keep interrupting Neighbours to come to the door and whinge about their dead families".

A first-year engineering student was, oddly, quoted as singling out gays, because "they're breaking God's law". To make matters worse, the editors of the University Observer's O2 culture and entertainment section added a lame disclaimer as a footnote to the piece, saying they were "not responsible for the shocking and downright offensive views of some of the student body of UCD".

That's not how academics and other students saw things when the January 29th issue of the paper hit the campus news stands. There were howls of protest and one student even tossed copies of the paper into the lake on the Belfield campus, in south Dublin.

The paper subsequently apologised on its front page and filled its letters page with critical correspondence, including a riposte from the dean of the medical faculty, who had just returned from a trip to Malaysia.

Prof Muiris FitzGerald wrote: "It would be very difficult for me or any other dean of medicine to explain to overseas educators and potential students how university students in UCD could express these opinions and have them published in a wide-circulation university newspaper."

Enda Curran, who was its editor at the time, lost his job shortly after. Now the dust has settled, the University Observer's acting editor, Stephen Cummins, sits in its neat offices in the students' union building at Belfield, his new Pumas pointed towards the door, with its large poster of Che Guevara, the late Argentinian guerrilla leader and revolutionary theorist.

He couldn't be more contrite about the editorial blunder. The vox-pop section was always off the wall, he says, with previous questions including one asking how you would blow up UCD.

"It was an undergraduate attempt at humour that went terribly wrong," says the 22-year-old arts graduate in a low-key manner while fiddling with a paper clip. Cummins says the article had attempted to tie in with a UCD speech by Bob Geldof, who had railed against racism and anti-immigrant sentiment in Ireland.

By coincidence, the vox-pop issue also carried a front-page report about an African student who was the victim of a racially motivated attack at Belfield.

The vox-pop controversy certainly put a spotlight on how third-level students, the next generation of leaders and politicians, are coping with ethnic and cultural diversity. If there is a lesson to be drawn from it - apart from the fact that student humour is in decline - surely it is the fact that our ivory towers cannot be assumed to be immune from racism.

Cummins says: "The question was wrong and stuff, but I think the views shocked people because people didn't think that university students, middle-class Ireland, has an element of racism. It got people talking about it."

Over in the forum room in the same building, four young Muslim women and one man, all science or engineering students, are holding a meeting of the college's Islamic Society. The women nod their hijab-draped heads when Sahar El-Habbash, a 20-year-old Palestinian, says everyone she speaks to on campus is open-minded and friendly. "I've never felt any racism or anything against me," she continues.

"Not in college," interjects Nuara Bizama, a 19-year-old Irish-born student whose father was born in Libya and whose mother was born in Ireland. El-Habbash readily agrees. "If you go to town or inner-city places where people are less educated, after September 11th people might have shouted something to do with the Taliban, but nothing major."

The Islamic Society recently held a multi-cultural event on campus, with students hosting stalls from various countries, including Ireland. "It brought people together and showed them different cultures," says El-Habbash. The students say they generally encounter curiosity about their religion and culture from other students, and are happy to help explain Islam to those interested. Their experience of the campus as a benign environment is largely consistent with a recent survey by the Union of Students in Ireland in which 83 per cent of respondents agreed that Ireland's racial, religious and cultural diversity adds to its strengths.

Nevertheless, there are signs that not all third-level students are right-on on the race question and that university campuses are being targeted by a man who denies that the Holocaust happened. Last month, he was escorted off Belfield, where he was putting up posters. He says he has also distributed flyers at University College Cork, the University of Limerick and Trinity College in Dublin.

Trinity's arts block was the venue for a talk on racism and the media that this writer gave last January, at the invitation of Ronit Lentin, course co-ordinator of the MPhil in ethnic and racial studies. After the talk, a German student was involved in an altercation with a group including three students who claimed to be associated with the overtly racist British National Party. Lentin says a fourth man gave a Nazi salute to the German student.

Lentin reported the incident to gardaí in nearby Pearse Street, but there is no law against making a racist gesture, and Irish law against incitement to hatred is notoriously weak. Nor is there any clear mechanism for reporting racist incidents on campus, says Lentin.

Morgan O'Sullivan, editor of the Express, University College Cork's student newspaper, says he has not heard of active student anti-immigrant or Nazi groups at the institution. "When flyers appear other students steal them and put them in the bin. I don't think there are any support groups on campus. If there are, they must be very much underground."

In any case, Katrina Goldstone, Amnesty International's anti-racism officer, says she is concerned that focusing on the activities of such marginal groups detracts attention from more subtle forms of "institutionalised racism", such as the failure of some colleges to provide adequate prayer, dietary or other facilities for overseas students or to put in place anti-racism policies.

She says: "It's difficult for college authorities to take on board institutionalised racism, because they feel they are not doing anything on purpose. But if I'm disadvantaged by the outcome of your action or lack of action, even if you didn't mean to exclude me, then that's institutionalised racism."

Antra Bhargava, a fourth-year law student from India, is Trinity's international-students liaison officer, a voluntary post to which she was elected by the council of the students' union. She says a medical student of Asian origin who grew up in the West recently confided to her that he was regularly abused by his classmates about his skin colour and the way he spoke. She notes a reluctance by such students to take any action, out of fear that it would only make matters worse.

Incidents like these are not common, but that they happen at all means they are a problem that should be addressed, says Bhargava. She suspects that name calling may be motivated by jealously of international students who outperform their Irish colleagues.

"I hear about racist things off campus all the time, but I was surprised when I heard about students picking on students on campus," she says. "It's an underhand, sneaky way of being racist. You are taking the fact that people are not from the same culture but maybe are better than you academically, and then turning it against them."

Recently, a list of students' names posted in Trinity's arts building was removed, covered in crude white-supremacist doodles, then pinned to the notice board for Lentin's course. Lentin, who is Jewish, is an outspoken critic of the Government's immigration policy. She is no stranger to hate mail and has received anti-Semitic letters in response to her regular column in Metro Eireann, the monthly multicultural newspaper.

She says she does not fear such incidents but would like to know what is going on. Is it just a few people or are they organised? "The provost is aware of the incidents and is very supportive, but the college should come out with a public anti-racism statement to show those who are inclined to racially harass people that it will not be tolerated," she says.

Of those who dismiss extreme activists as cranks and loners who exist in a twilight world of website anarchy, Goldstone says we must remember that their activities are intended to incite hatred and to intimidate and frighten minorities. She says we need to look at the bigger picture. "These sorts can thrive when broader society lets racism off the hook. Holocaust denial is a crime in a number of other countries. There are loopholes in Irish law at the moment in adequately punishing this and other types of racist crime. What kind of message does that give out? These groups are more a symptom, if you like, of a greater reluctance to take seriously and to challenge racism in a strong fashion, at State level."