The teenage boys with Dublin accents lounged on the steps of their place of worship chatting about sport. It could have been an after Mass scene anywhere in the city. But this was the Clonskeagh Mosque, and these were boys whose parents had come to Ireland from half a dozen countries in Asia, the Mediterranean and Africa.
Ireland's Muslims are here to stay. There are now 11,000 of them, making them the third-largest denomination in the State after Roman Catholics and the Church of Ireland. There are nine mosques or Islamic societies in Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Limerick, Galway, Ballyhaunis and Cavan.
The third annual Islamic cultural exhibition opened at the weekend in a hall beside the mosque and will run until July 11th. On the next two Sundays there will also be Islamic food festivals.
"In this increasingly multicultural society it is important that there is dialogue between the different cultures so that we may understand each other better," said Mr Arif Fitzsimon, the Islamic Cultural Centre's public relations officer.
"Islam tends to be misunderstood as often the only knowledge the general public has about it is based on the extreme behaviour of certain individuals."
Mr Fitzsimon is an Englishman with a Co Tipperary mother and a Dublin paternal great-grandfather. He has been a Muslim for nearly 10 years and was working in the Liverpool Mosque until two months ago.
The centre of the exhibition is a highly-ornamented, Bedouin-style tent. It also features a poster introduction to Islam; displays of calligraphy based on Arabic texts and embroidered versions of the Koran; a model of a Bosnian mosque destroyed in the war there; paintings by two Iraqi artists, Sardiq Toma and Shakir Ahmed, the latter now based in Ireland; and a huge selection of Muslim books and tapes.
The most interesting section is probably that on Islamic women. More women in Ireland, the UK and the US convert to Islam than men, said Mr Fitzsimon.
Ms Amel Omran, from Sudan, one of those supervising the exhibition, could offer no explanation for this. She said she had "rechosen" her Muslim faith in Ireland because it represented "a very balanced way to live" when she was far away from the "unconditional love" of her family, homeland and culture. She is a thoroughly emancipated young woman, doing a PhD in equality studies at UCD.
A photographic section spells out the exhibition's aim to dispel some of the misinformation about Muslims. It notes that some recent "multi-million-dollar action movies and CD-ROM game simulations have portrayed Muslims as terrorists and fanatics and the new enemies of the civilised world".
"Islamophobia has become ingrained in the mainstream European psyche, feeding on generations of culture since the crusades, and leading to extreme cases in the heart of Europe."