Leon Diop was about 11 when he first experienced explicit racism. “We were playing and a group of older lads came over and started messing with us.” They singled Diop out and called him a name. It wasn’t the N-word, but it was racially charged and it was viscerally hurtful and it feels wrong to type it here. “Oh my God. It was such a horrible moment,” he says. “Just the complete shock. It was dehumanising. I wanted to go home. I didn’t want to be out.”

I meet Diop, the insightful, calm and good-humoured cofounder of the advocacy, community and educational group Black and Irish, at a hotel near the office where he works on Merrion Square. He has just published Mixed Up: An Irish Boy’s Journey to Belonging, a very moving, thought-provoking memoir about growing up as a “brown kid” in Tallaght.

He is very good at articulating how unthinking racism can affect a sensitive young person. The book is aimed at a teenage audience because, he says, “I would have benefited from something along the lines of this when I was that age ... From the work that we do at schools, we see that levels of racism are still high. [Many are] experiencing racism from other students or even from teachers at times. And then we also have kids who don’t really feel fully anything. They don’t feel like they can say that they’re Irish, because even though they were born here and have only ever known an Irish experience, both of their parents are from Cameroon or Nigeria or South Africa, but then on the other side, they feel they can’t say that they’re Nigerian or Ghanaian or South African, either, because they haven’t grown up there.”

Does he remember the first time he realised he was in a minority? “My mam recalls me [as a small child] identifying myself as a ‘brown kid’ and noticing that there was other black kids and white kids but I don’t remember it,” he says. “She was telling me that I was pensive about it, but later on that day I was out playing and I was fine.”

He has a good life, he says, but racism and insecurity about his identity were recurring issues.