Theord Mayor of Dublin, Alderman Joe Doyle, has received racist hate mail after he launched a campaign to integrate refugees and other immigrants into the city.
In the past few days he has received two letters of this type.
One was a printed sheet reading "Save Ireland: Stop the Nigerian invasion".
The second was a cutting from the front page of last Tuesday's Irish Times, with a report on the launch of his "Many Peoples One City" initiative, and a picture of two pupils, one originally from Angola, from a national school in the south inner-city.
Scrawled across the children's faces in white ink was: "Joe Doyle - nigger lover and enemy of the Dublin people! We don't want black shit in our city."
Mr Doyle said yesterday he found the latter item "so repulsive I can't find words to describe my feelings.
I don't mind being called `nigger lover'. But `black shit' - if that's the city I'm Lord Mayor of, then I'd rather not be. But I know it's not."
The Lord Mayor said he had been told that refugees were the object of racist remarks on Dublin's streets, and those who had been in other European cities said they had never experienced such public abuse before.
The co-ordinator of the Government's national committee on racism and interculturalism, Mr Philip Watt, said similar racist and threatening literature had been pushed through the letterboxes of refugees and asylumseekers in the north and south inner-city in recent weeks.
"In the light of the Government's review of the Incitement to Hatred Act, they will have to take into account that these activities are continuing to happen, and appear to be on the increase."