Watching Perry Ogden's debut feature, Pavee Lackeen, you can't help but think that in its rush to embrace multiculturalism - Ireland has forgotten its travelling community.

Walk through Dublin's city centre and you will notice the African hair salons, the Romanian beggars, and the all-Chinese staff in almost every convenience store. Muslim children from Eastern Europe play with white Irish Catholic children in the school playground - unheard of ten years ago. Recently, the country's most respected broadsheet, The Irish Times, ran a special feature on immigration, asking: Is enough being done to integrate foreigners into the community? What are schools doing to ensure that prejudice and racism are not allowed to breed? The consensus was for more to be done to ensure that in 10 years time the new Ireland is a place of harmony rather than a nation of ghettos and marginalized communities.

Meanwhile, the home-grown ethnic minority that were around long before the first influx of foreigners arrived in the late 90s are still very much on the margins of society - as starkly demonstrated in Pavee Lackeen.

Most of the action is seen through the eyes of Winnie Maughan who lives in a trailer with her mother Rosie and various brothers and sisters. The actors are largely amateurs, drawn from the travelling community. The dialogue is sparse and there is not so much a story line as a collection of set pieces. It is often hard to distinguish whether you are watching a documentary or a work of fiction but that is where the film's main strength lies. It never slips into worthiness or pity but gives a realistic and uncompromising view of life as a traveller.

Winnie has been suspended from school and does not want to go back because 'everyone knows her there.' They pick on her because her father has left the family and one of her older brothers is in jail for an unspecified drug crime. She fills her days wandering around Dublin. She visits a shop full of new age charms and memorabilia, a video store, a hair salon and an amusement arcade. Like a magpie she is attracted to all that glitters and all that is bright and colourful. Interestingly, the places she goes to perhaps are those where she knows she won't feel uncomfortable. The girl doling out chips in the arcade is Chinese, the video store only stocks Russian films; the hairdressers specialises in braiding Afro hair. Underlying is the idea that while foreigners can set up their businesses and find jobs, the travellers are still treated with contempt.

The council come to ask Winnie's mother to move along. Her trailer is parked on the side of the road in an industrial area of Dublin. Lorries trundle past and the only running water is a single outdoor tap. The man from the council explains that Rosie and her family will be a few hundred yards up the road - away from the noise and the traffic. They promise to organise running water for her trailer. Weeks later, having moved, she is still waiting. It turns out that the land she's been moved on to does not belong to the council, and this means that they are under no obligation to find her a house.

There is no resolution to these events at the film's end and you can only assume that the cycle of poverty and helplessness at the hands of bureaucracy continues. That said, Pavee Lackeen has uplifting moments that save it from being just a portrait of despair. Winnie and her sisters try to entertain their social worker by rapping. They watch the video of their aunt's wedding over and over, and dream of their own weddings - usually at an early age in the travelling community. We see the children getting dressed up and dyeing her hair for a big night out. It turns out that's it's all in aid of walking to the chip van for a takeaway and eating it sitting on a wall.' It's boring, isn't it,' says Winnie swinging her legs.

Moments like these demonstrate that these children are sulky, moody, outrageous, and full of hope and fed up like most other children their age. The only difference is how others see them. Winnie's social worker tries to find her a place in a school with settled children, but she finds it almost impossible to find one to accept her. She admits that the reason is that Winnie is a traveller.

It is doubtful that Ogden has made this film with the intention of shaming a society with pretensions towards inclusiveness, but that is what it does. Pavee Lackeen reminds Ireland that it has a long way to go before becoming truly progressive.

Pavee Lackeen is released on DVD on May 22nd