One of the most heartbreaking experiences I’ve encountered in recent times was comforting a young boy who had been racially abused. It was last year and it was just after a soccer match in which my son Patrick was playing. As I waited to take him home, he came walking with his arm around his teammate. The young lad was in tears. His parents are African and he had just endured horrible verbal abuse by other 12-year-olds on the opposing team. Yes, 12-year-olds.

The only good part of the situation was the fact that Patrick had his arm around him telling him that he was worth 100 times more than any of the young twits who had called him all sorts of vile names during the match. How in the name of God is this acceptable in the 21st century? What sort of parenting instills such disturbing traits in a child? I’m 100% certain that anybody, particularly a child, who is racist has it bred in to them at home.

Patrick was very upset to see his friend, the nicest and kindest young fellow you could meet reduced to tears on a football field in front of his friends. That is because Patrick and the other teammates who gathered around to support the boy come from homes where such vileness doesn’t exist. I never had to sit my children down and tell them not to be racist. It was never an issue. They are growing up going to school and sports clubs with children from a multitude of backgrounds. And so everybody they mix with treats everybody else equally regardless of their skin colour. It comes naturally. So I could sense after that incident that Patrick was in a state of shock because it was his first real life experience of racism. It was as if he didn’t know that such a thing existed.

And only for I saw it with my own two eyes that day too, I’d have found it hard to believe that 12-year-old boys today could come out with such hatred. But instead of racism being stamped out and becoming a relic of history, we’re discovering how very much alive and well it is in this country, not to mention how it thrives across the western world. Whatever about sickos in the schoolyard or football field hurling abuse at defenceless peers, more disturbing is how cavalier adults are with casual racism. RTÉ presenter Zainab Boladale went public last week about the abuse she’s had to endure on the streets alongside, needless to say, the grim lower reaches of that toxic cesspit, Twitter.

Her story came at the end of a week of Liveline programmes highlighting bullying in the wake of the Ana Kriegel case.

I was in the presenter’s chair for two of those programmes taking a call from, among others, a mother whose 14-year-old daughter took her life earlier this year because of alleged bullying from adults.

For any parent who thinks that casual racism is OK, if they experienced what I did seeing the distress and fear in that young boys face last year, they might change their tune. We Irish of all people should know better.