November 11, 2007
Old Walls, New Spirit

By PAUL SCHNEIDER
HALF a thousand years ago, in 1508, Juan Ponce de León arrived on the island of Puerto Rico and set up an outpost near the back of the great harbor on the island's northeast coast. He had with him a company of soldiers, a famously vicious red dog named Becerillo, and permission to use whatever means necessary to convince the local Taino people that they would rather look for gold in the rivers and salvation in heaven than carry on enjoying their little tropical paradise.

The island, which the locals called Boriquen, had been previously discovered and named San Juan by Columbus, whose physician described it glowingly, especially the houses with their “beautiful gardens, as if they were vineyards or orchards of orange or citron trees.” But Ponce de León, whom one historian described as “a bastard son of the best-known family in Seville,” wasn't much interested in fruit. “We came to serve God,” as one of his generation of conquistadors famously said, “and also to get rich.”

Today, Old San Juan is a place of narrow cobbled streets and blocks of well-preserved colonial architecture where you can glimpse a microcosmic vision of the entire post-Columbian history of the Americas, from the essentially medieval mayhem of the early European invasion to the madcap Nuyorican partying of the 21st century. Though it's not in exactly the same location as Ponce de León's original settlement, that hardly matters: it is the restaurant-, nightclub- and museum-packed heart of what is arguably the most vibrant city in the Caribbean, not to mention the most exotic urban setting Americans can get to these days without a passport.

Having recently emerged from a long personal obsession with the Spanish explorers who followed Ponce de León to North America, a quest that resulted in my most recent book, I took my family last winter to the city. Like almost all visitors, we started at El Morro, the great fortress with its cannons pointing out to sea. It was Sunday midmorning when we walked across its great lawn toward the battlements, and it seemed as though all the residents of the city had gathered on the sunny hillside to picnic and fly kites of all shapes and sizes: there were dragons, ships of the line, bats and Spidermen, all dipping and diving in the trade winds and attached by long strings to smiling children.

El Morro, it seemed to me, belonged to all five centuries of the city's past and present. It was begun in the first decades of the Spanish occupation of the island, when the city's location was chosen because of its harbor near the border between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Construction continued through the second century, when its cannonballs flew against pirates and Englishmen, and the third century, when the cannonballs flew against pirates and Dutchmen. In the 1800s, nationalists were jailed in its dark dungeons, and the cannonballs flew against pirates and Americans, while in the 1900s the guns were fired by Americans against the Germans. Once the proud symbol of Spanish military power in the hemisphere, it's now a national historic site.

The paranoid grandeur of global empires is evident everywhere in Old San Juan. As massive as El Morro is, and as long as it took to build, it wasn't enough. With gold and silver flowing from Peru and Mexico, the harbor's strategic location near the major routes into the Caribbean made San Juan more important than ever and more forts were built there — La Fortaleza, San Cristóbal and several smaller structures that are now gone.

And grandest of all, in 1630 with taxes levied elsewhere in the empire, construction began on La Muralla — the Wall. When it was finished, nearly 200 years later, it encircled the entire city. It was built, in large part, by slaves: “For the love of God send 100 negroes,” wrote a military captain to Madrid, “we can scarcely work for the great heat.” The Africans were needed in the 1600s because the Indians, for the most part, were dead.

In the afternoon light we wandered along the Paseo de la Princesa, the promenade that traces the foot of the wall on the outside. For a stretch, near the cruise ship docks, it was a lively and shaded place full of street vendors and other entertainments, with the wall a friendly backdrop. Only when the path turned a couple of corners and passed the San Juan Gate, taking us between the restless sea and the patient wall toward El Morro in the distance, did the sheer enormity of the undertaking make itself clear. Lore has it that the queen of Spain, upon being asked by a courtier why she gazed out at the sea so intently, replied, “So much gold has gone to fortifying Puerto Rico that I half expect to see it gleaming there on the horizon.”

The walls — 40 feet high in places, 45 feet thick at the base — feel military and medieval, but the blocks protected within them are of a more elegant vintage. Pretty much any street we chose to walk down in the heart of Old San Juan was a trove of 18th-century Spanish colonial architecture. There were plenty of earlier and later structures mixed in, like the Iglesia de San José, which was built in the 1530s and is suitably Gothic for the second oldest Christian church in the Western Hemisphere. And never mind that the stores on the first floor on Calle del Cristo might be Ralph Lauren or Ben & Jerry's, the overriding feeling was early to mid-1700s.

Old San Juan is not a big area, seven blocks by six blocks, give or take a few, with tiny streets cobbled with distinctive glassy, bluish cobbles that mostly came during the 18th century as ballast in ships bound for the Indies. On back streets, big wooden doors set into pastel walls give way to Andalusian-style courtyards, and narrow second-story balconies are sometimes festooned with plants.

Each block has its own flavor, some congested with cars or tourists, some filled with interesting shops, some seemingly almost forgotten.

One time, we came in the same way that a person arriving in San Juan in a ship in the latter half of the 1700s would, through the San Juan Gate, known as the “water gate” because it was the primary route into the city from the sea. In those days on wobbly land-legs we would have walked the steep and verdant (today at least) block of Calle San Juan to the Cathedral of San Juan to give thanks for our safe arrival. In our case, we toured the church, which is lovely and mysterious in the way Catholic churches ultimately are to the uninitiated. Then we went across the street and had a deliciously languid lunch in the portico of El Convento Hotel, which once was a convent and now has a painting in the lobby that looks remarkably like Jesus on a cellphone. We wished we were staying there.

We wished the same thing about Casa Blanca, the house that was constructed in the 1520s for Ponce de León. He himself didn't live long enough to occupy it, though for centuries his heirs did. With its high ceilings, dark wood floors and large unadorned windows overlooking the harbor, it has an elegant, oddly almost modern feel.

An old drawing of the city in the foyer suggests that the house you tour was actually constructed somewhat later than the 1520s, on top of the boxier first floor that served mostly as a refuge in times of attack from disgruntled Taino slaves. (In an odd bit of synchronicity, in one of the outbuildings of Casa Blanca are housed some 15,000 Taino artifacts that are being carefully cataloged and stored in Ziploc bags, but have no suitable home.) Added even later still were the surrounding gardens, which were planted by the first American governor of the island in the 19th century.

Nonetheless, it's in the overgrown places down between the house and the city wall that the deep past can really sneak up on you. It's reminiscent of the last painting in Thomas Cole's “Course of Empire” cycle, with great trees and vines slowly overtaking the ancient parapets, and you get the feeling that there are cycles of history at work in Old San Juan that don't measure time in centuries.

The 19th century is when sugar overtook coffee as the primary export crop of Puerto Rico, which seemed as good a reason as any for making a stop at the diminutive Don Q rum museum and shop across the street from Pier 1, on the waterfront. Though the Cuban émigré Bacardi is the giant of the business and has an enormous distillery in San Juan, Puerto Ricans generally prefer the brand founded by Juan Serrallés in 1865 in the city of Ponce on the island's southern coast. (Yes, there are free samples.)

Sugar and rum, of course, have roots that reach into slavery, and we went to the Museo de Nuestra Raíz Africana (Museum of Our African Roots) and the West African roots room of the Museo des las Américas, which are both worthwhile. But where we really felt ourselves lucky was later that night when we wound up quite by accident at the Plaza San José, on Calle San Sebastián, during a traditional bomba party. The bomba is a percussive and vocal music and dance with African ancestry, in which audience members take turns challenging the bank of drummers to match their moves with percussive expression and drummers counterchallenging the dancers.

One might argue that the survival of the past in places like El Morro and in dances like the bomba is what makes the present interesting and gives one hope for a lively future. Yes, that sounds good. But truth be told, it's usually coffee that gives me faith in the future, and Puerto Ricans grow and brew some of the best without all the foamy foofaraw we've been led to believe is necessary.

The place that turns the corner from 19th to 20th century is the family-run bakery and coffee shop La Bombonera, founded in 1902. The counter is long and the booths are many, but we still had to get there as early as we could to avoid waiting in line. We ordered mallorca con mantequilla (a round, flat pastry dusted with confectioner's sugar and served with butter), café con leche and fresh orange juice. All around us locals were trading gossip and eating their breakfasts more slowly than we were. We marveled at the mallorcas when they arrived, and ordered another round.

As befits a breakfast place that opened at the turn of the century, La Bombonera was really only the beginning. What captures the essence of Old San Juan today, at least for travelers, is probably found on a plate in a lively restaurant, waiting to be eaten. It's a dish of mahi mahi ceviche, maybe, at the buzzy tapas restaurant Barú. Or a flank steak Creole style at the Parrot Club. Or a dozen other delectables at a dozen other restaurants in what is surely the cuisine capital of the Caribbean. Later — and later means pretty much all night long in Old San Juan, particularly if it's a Saturday — it's in a glass with ice and lime to be sipped between dances at any of a number of live music clubs that you find just by following your ears around Calle Fontaleza after hours.

But in the inevitable morning after, it is always back to La Bombonera for coffee and mallorca. More coffee. And then to the hill at El Morro, to lie back on the grass in the shadow of the great fort, to listen to the sea and watch the kites diving and dancing through squinted eyes. Perchance to doze.

VISITOR INFORMATION

San Juan is on the way to everywhere else in the Caribbean, so getting there is easy and fares are generally lower than to other Caribbean destinations, particularly during peak travel seasons. A recent online search for round-trip flights out of the New York area over a long weekend in either late November or early December turned up fares from $242 to $287 on a number of airlines, including American, Delta, Continental and JetBlue. Though you may want to rent a car if you go beyond San Juan (and most major companies have outlets at the San Juan airport), you don't need a car if you are staying in the city itself. In fact, given the narrow Old World streets of the old city, you really don't want one.

WHERE TO STAY

Stay right in Old San Juan, rather than in the beach strip hotels out at Condado (unless sand is mandatory). If your budget is expansive, you want the Hotel El Convento (100 Calle del Cristo; 800-468-2779; www.elconvento.com; double rooms start at $385). Housed in a 360-year-old former Carmelite convent, it's the kind of place that you'll remember even when the rest of the city starts to fade. If you want efficient, friendly and relatively inexpensive, try the Hotel Milano (307 Calle Fontaleza; 787-729-9050; www.hotelmilanopr.com; doubles from $95 to $145 a night). Ask for an upper floor facing the street.

WHERE TO EAT

The abundance of good restaurants in Old San Juan is a reason in itself to visit. Most of the best serve some sort of Afro-Caribbean “nuevo Latino” cuisine, which is another way of saying there's a lot of good ceviche going around. You won't be disappointed with the tapas at Barú (150 Calle San Sebastián; 787-977-7107), the churrasco-style steak at the Parrot Club (363 Calle Fortaleza; 787-725-7370) or the more Asian-inflected food at its sister restaurant Dragonfly, across the street.

It's an all-night town, especially on weekends. Nuyorican Café (312 Calle San Francisco; 787-977-1276) justifiably gets most of the attention for its nonstop life and Latin sound, but you can pretty much follow your ears around Calle Fortaleza and find your way into a party that will go on longer than you will.

PAUL SCHNEIDER is the author of “Brutal Journey: Cabeza de Vaca and the Epic First Crossing of North America” (Henry Holt, 2006).

GREGORY D. JOHNSEN
Al Qaeda's generational split
By Gregory D. Johnsen | November 9, 2007

RECENT CONFUSION over the status of Jamal al-Badawi, one the masterminds of the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, illustrates the difficulties of containing an increasingly fractured jihadist movement. Badawi, who escaped from prison early last year, had surrendered to the Yemeni government in early October, only to be released as part of a plea deal. These events have sparked confusion and anger in the United States.

In Yemen, meanwhile, authorities have continued to make misleading and ambiguous statements about his whereabouts. It would be easy to assume, as many have done, that the country's reaction was that of a reluctant ally eager to shirk its responsibility in the war against Al Qaeda. This reading, as Rudy Giuliani suggested, demands that the United States threaten Yemen with a reduction in aid.

But what to the United States is a cohesive organization bound together by a common hatred is to Yemen a fragmented movement that is rife with infighting and dissension.

Over the past several months, a generational schism has emerged within Al Qaeda's ranks in Yemen, pitting younger, more radicalized members against the more experienced old guard. Since 2003, the Yemeni government and Al Qaeda in Yemen have reached what could best be described as a tacit nonaggression pact. Through a combination of military action and negotiation, Yemen has attempted to convince the militants not that their beliefs are incorrect, but rather that they would hurt their own cause and base of operations by acting violently within the borders of the state.

These negotiations have led to the release of numerous Al Qaeda operatives, who have pledged not to carry out attacks within the country. Yemen has a long tradition of co-opting its enemies; the government used this technique to buy off southern officers after a secession attempt in 1994.

To the new generation of Al Qaeda in Yemen, many of whom have been radicalized in Iraq, this arrangement is tantamount to a treasonous alliance with tyrants. This summer, under the leadership of Nasir al-Wuhayshi - Osama bin Laden's former secretary and a fellow escapee of Badawi's - the new generation issued a statement articulating its policy.

The statement, which was aimed at Al Qaeda's old guard, warned that jihad could not be paused in order to seek the release of prisoners. Indeed, the new generation showed little interest in the worldly fate of those prisoners. "If they are killed," the statement said, "they end up as martyrs."

This rare, public outburst spoke volumes about the levels of dissension current among Al Qaeda in Yemen. The old guard had advised younger members to have patience and allow for negotiations with the Yemeni government to continue. They were also concerned that any attacks within Yemen could lead to a government crackdown on its leadership, much like what happened in the aftermath of the USS Cole attack and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The break between the two generations was finalized later in the summer when, on July 2, a suicide bomber struck a caravan of tourists in Marib, killing 10 people. After the attack Yemen has attempted to drive a wedge between the two generations. Those members who agree to negotiate and pledge not to carry out attacks in Yemen are rewarded with their freedom, while authorities hunt down those who refuse, such as the four Al Qaeda members who were killed in a raid on a safe house a month later.

The four months of negotiation and subsequent release of Badawi is coherent with this strategy. Obviously, any policy that includes releasing terrorists responsible for US deaths, especially a policy that is as opaque and personalized as the Yemeni one, is not one that is designed to please the United States. But the solution is not to try to change Yemen's priorities by threatening to withdraw aid at a time when it is struggling with a host of economic and security problems. An insistence on viewing all jihadists as part of the same organization will not help either.

Yemen's effort to play two generations of Al Qaeda off against each other is a nuanced and local response to a complex problem. The United States has to realize that a one-size-fits-all approach to the war on terrorism is not in its long-term interests. Diplomatic carrots rather than threatening sticks are the only way to convince Yemen to pursue a counterterrorism strategy that benefits both countries.

Gregory D. Johnsen is an analyst for the Jamestown Foundation and a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton.

Iraq Vets Urge 'Patience' For Political Reconciliation, Knock War Critics
By Nathan Burchfiel
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
November 09, 2007

(CNSNews.com) - Three veterans of the Iraq war on Thursday said lawmakers who support a quick end to the conflict should exercise patience in waiting for political reconciliation to grow out of increased stability in the region.

"We're not going to be able to expect the kind of military progress that we've had to immediately translate into political reconciliation," 1st Lt. Pete Hegseth said Thursday at the American Veterans' Center annual conference in Washington, D.C. "You have to create the space militarily for real political reconciliation and there is no timeline."

Hegseth served in Iraq in 2005 and is now the executive director of Vets for Freedom, a group that supports keeping troops in Iraq. He said the Iraqi people feel "wounds so deep ... that they're not going to be healed because of a six-month surge."

"I think we do need to be patient," Hegseth said, insisting that "you can't put a definitive timeline on it."

Hegseth said the "surge" strategy implemented earlier this year has been successful, calling it "finally the right strategy to be using in that country. We're finally protecting the population at a neighborhood level." He pointed to the month-to-month decrease in military and civilian deaths since the surge was implemented as evidence of its success.

As Cybercast News Service has previously reported, Pentagon statistics from October showed a decline in monthly deaths, continuing a trend that started in May 2007 when the surge was fully implemented.

Hegseth criticized the media for playing up the fact that 2007 has been the deadliest year for American troops while largely ignoring the positive trend in recent months.

Hegseth's colleagues had more harsh opinions of anti-war officials and spokesmen. Staff Sgt. David Bellavia, who fought in the Battle of Fallujah and founded Vets for Freedom upon his return to the United States, said war detractors "have chosen to become partisan rhetoric and divide a nation that doesn't need division."

He specifically targeted vocal war critic Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), saying the congressman's words and actions have been "really shameful and ill-advised" and that Murtha "was a hero, [he] was a patriot, and now he's judged by his last actions."

Bellavia criticized elected officials who seek a timeline for success in Iraq tied to a withdrawal strategy.

"You would never ask that question of Gen. MacArthur," he said, referring to the World War II general who led U.S. forces in the Pacific. "The reason why the 'greatest generation' was great was because the World War II generation understood they had to win their war."

Bellavia, who returned to Iraq as a reporter after his tour of duty was finished, said "there is success now and no one will acknowledge it ... people are still not believing it." He said war detractors are "waiting for a miracle that's already happened."

Sgt. Marco Martinez, who served in Iraq in 2003 and is now a member of Vets for Freedom, said he believes servicemen and women are being misrepresented by a vocal minority who oppose continuing to fight in Iraq.

"I have not met one man when I was in that wanted to come back," Martinez said, referring to suggestions that a large number of troops do not support the mission. He said anti-war soldiers are "idiots [who] signed the contract not knowing what they were getting into."

"You're going to get a couple guys who didn't know what they were doing," Martinez, who received the Navy Cross for valiant service, said. "The media's quick to jump on those guys and make them the mouthpiece of the military and that's wrong."

Hegseth said that "far too often our legislators hear from the CodePinkers and the MoveOn.org people screaming in their face," referring to vocal anti-war groups with well-organized legislative outreach campaigns.

He added that his group seeks to counteract anti-war efforts by organizing meetings between elected officials and soldiers who support the war.

DEBKAfile Exclusive: Lebanon will be a second Iraq, says Hizballah in strident threat against US bases

October 29, 2007, 3:18 PM (GMT+02:00)

Nawaf Mussawi, one of the leaders of the Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite movement, has threatened: “We will treat US soldiers in Lebanon like an army of occupation.”

Lebanese and Israeli military sources advise taking the Hizballah threat seriously. Its gunmen will violently oppose the American plan for its military and instructors to provide the Lebanese national army with an edge against the Hizballah militia. They will also fight tooth and nail any American bid to implement the UN Security Council Resolution 1559 ordering the disbanding of Hizballah, and no doubt receive orders from Tehran to pre-empt a US military presence and bases in Lebanon.

The Shiite extremists’ bellicose response follows exclusive disclosures in DEBKA-Net-Weekly and DEBKAfile of the master plan developed by US CENTCOM chief, Adm. William Fallon, for upgrading and augmenting the Lebanese army. It entails the creation and training of four new brigades as elite units to provide a shield for the Beirut government.

On Sept. 7, 2007, DEBKA-Net-Weekly 317 revealed:

“The US army undertook to establish within six months, four Lebanese commando brigades trained to secure the regime against any foreign or domestic threat and be professional enough to take on the Iran-backed Hizballah militia.”

On Sept. 21, DEBKA-Net-Weekly 318 supplemented its first revelation by reporting:

“For the first time since President Ronald Reagan pulled all US forces out of Lebanon, an American government is planning to build a number of military bases in the country around the hub of a big air base at Kleiat in the north, facing the Syrian border.

Lebanese chief of staff Gen. Michel Suleiman commented last week that if anyone in the Beirut government had known of these plans, they would have reached him.

However, Monday, Oct. 22, the pro-Syrian Lebanese paper Al-Safir reported that the Americans were about to establish military bases in Lebanon.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Adm. Fallon is due in Lebanon shortly to help American plans for the Lebanese army to move along.

Nerves in Beirut are growing tauter: US military projects move forward, on the one hand, Tehran and Damascus are pro-active in Lebanon’s military and political affairs, on the other, and the repeatedly delayed disputed presidential election, now postponed to Nov. 12, hangs over Lebanese heads.

Our sources add that Hizballah’s threat of a “second Iraq” in Lebanon may be interpreted as terrorist strikes against American military instructors and troops - up to and including sparking a civil war on the Shiite-Sunni sectarian lines that are bedeviling Iraq.

According to our military sources, the 25,000-strong Hizballah militia is better organized and trained than any of its opposite numbers in Iraq. Its leaders are not averse to reminding Washington of the events of 1983, when Syria and Hizballah using the terror tactics of massacre and hostage-taking, drove American forces out of Lebanon for 24 years.

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Hustling to Find Classrooms For All in a Diverse Ireland
Shortage of Space for Immigrants' Children Reflects Challenges of Integrating Newcomers
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 24, 2007; A12

BALBRIGGAN, Ireland -- Happy little learners filed out of school at midday, smiling in their furry jackets and clutching a parent's hand. It could have been anywhere in Ireland, except that almost every child had immigrant parents -- the vast majority of them black -- from places as distant as Angola, Congo and Zimbabwe.

Bracken Educate Together National School was opened last month as an emergency measure when education officials realized they had no school places for scores of local children, almost all of them Irish-born children of immigrants.

The opening of Ireland's first predominantly black school, in this suburban town just north of Dublin, illustrates the pressures facing once-sleepy Ireland as its population and economy boom. Once almost entirely white and Catholic, the country is struggling to integrate hundreds of thousands of new immigrants and to provide them with education, health, welfare and transportation services as fast as they arrive.

"This is the front line in all this," said Gerry McKevitt, an administrator at the Balbriggan school, looking around its temporary home in a summer retreat house for inner-city children. "This is where the problems are emerging. This is where integration is going to happen or not."

After 150 years of population decline as native Irish fled dire economic conditions, Ireland is now one of Europe's fastest-growing and most prosperous nations. The white-hot "Celtic Tiger" economy of recent years has leveled off, but Ireland continues to be a magnet for immigrants.

The nation's population is now just over 4.1 million, its highest level since before the famine years of the mid-19th century. Much of the growth has been fueled by immigration: According to the 2006 census, more than 600,000 Irish residents, about one in seven, were born abroad -- including returning children of Irish emigrants.

Government officials say they believe the true figure could be much higher, citing the difficulty of counting newcomers living in crowded group houses. The Polish immigrant population is officially about 62,000, but Conor Lenihan, the Irish integration minister, said in an interview that the actual number of Poles here could be closer to 200,000.

"Ireland has been subject to something that no other country in history has ever been subject to: sudden-onset migration," said Lenihan, whose post was created this year. "We have seen our non-Irish population go from zero to about 15 percent in 10 years."

At the same time, in less than a decade, Ireland has added nearly 600,000 new houses or apartments, according to government figures. Suburbs such as Lucan, west of Dublin, and Balbriggan, to the north, are now filled with almost identical pastel-colored townhouses on fields where cows and sheep used to graze.

Critics say that construction of schools, hospitals and train lines and provision of other public and social services have not kept pace with the growth. The problems in education and housing "show all the signs of a failure to plan," the Irish Times said in an editorial this week.

Public education in Ireland is paid for by the government but administered almost exclusively by the Catholic Church, which operates 92 percent of primary schools. The other 8 percent are run by Protestant churches or groups such as Educate Together, a private organization that operates 44 "multi-denominational" schools across the country.

On the main train line between Dublin and Belfast, near Dublin airport and nestled next to the sea, Balbriggan is a magnet for young Irish families looking for reasonably priced housing. It is also attracting a swelling wave of immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and the mostly Eastern European nations that joined the European Union in 2004.

"We have always been a very welcoming town, but things have happened too quickly, too fast," said May McKeon, a local government official in Balbriggan. "We have a lot of catching up to do with the social infrastructure. We're just victims of our times, really."

In August, education officials realized that Balbriggan's six schools, including one Educate Together school, were oversubscribed. Scores of children, many of them 4- and 5-year-olds just starting school, had nowhere to go.

Officials appealed to Educate Together to quickly set up an emergency school to handle the overflow. Within a month, the company had established a new school in a dormitory-style building near the seashore.

"We didn't know what we were going to do," said Florence Denti, who moved to Balbriggan last winter looking for relief from skyrocketing Dublin rents.

Denti, who migrated to Ireland from South Africa with her husband six years ago, said she dreaded the possibility of having to commute with her daughter, Shazia, 5, to the Dublin school she attended last year.

Now Shazia attends the Balbriggan school, where bright rooms are decorated with posters of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and nursery rhymes.

"This is a godsend," said Michelle McKay-Nkadimeng, a South African immigrant whose daughter, Tatiana, 4, also attends the school.

Paul Rowe, chief executive of Educate Together, said the school now has 86 students from at least a dozen countries. He said 90 percent have immigrant parents and 80 percent are black.

The school's opening led to headlines across Ireland calling the country's first mostly black school an example of racism or even "apartheid." Critics said the Catholic Church was excluding children who were "not ours."

In recent interviews at the Balbriggan school, neither administrators nor parents interviewed said they believed the problem stemmed from racism. Most parents said they felt welcome in Ireland. But several said that they believed school enrollment policies favored Catholics and that the government was generally slow to provide services in areas with heavy concentrations of immigrants.

"It's not a racist issue, it's an issue of bad planning," said McKevitt, the school administrator. "But it's the immigrants who end up the most disenfranchised."

Anne McDonagh, director of education for the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin, said school enrollment policies did not create the problems in Balbriggan.

The church's policy is to give first preference to Catholics and to siblings of current students, she said. But she added that Catholic schools in Dublin alone have students from 104 countries and about 30 religious faiths.

A 2004 survey of 92 schools around Dublin found that children of immigrants accounted for at least 20 percent of the student body in 11 schools. In one Balbriggan school, McDonagh said, one-third of the students are children of immigrants.

But Jean-Pierre Eyanga of Integrating Ireland, an immigrant support group, said church policies resulted in unfair treatment of the children of non-Catholic immigrants, particularly Africans and Muslims.

"They don't have a brother or sister in school, and they don't have a baptismal certificate," he said. "So they are the ones left out."

Eyanga said that what happened in Balbriggan -- and in two other overcrowded Dublin suburbs where emergency schools were opened this fall -- shows that Ireland needs both more schools and more multi-denominational schools.

"They need a broader, more coherent approach to planning," he said. "What happened in Balbriggan can happen tomorrow in other parts of Ireland."