Learning about Ireland through Loras College

When I went to Dublin, Ireland for my junior second semester, I learned to both use what I had heard in the classroom to make connections with what I witnessed in the city, and also who to be an active learner by giving back my knowledge to the community and sharing it with others.

Just like the moist air and the wet green grass, Ireland is dense and saturated with history. I was fortunate enough to have taken Auge's Modern Irish Literature class a semester before I went, and it helped put what I was seeing and reading and hearing in Dublin into context. Some of my fellow study abroad students were not as lucky to have taken a class like that before hand, and they even admitted to me that they felt like there were gaps missing in their comprehension of the city. I felt like it all made sense... Even though I did not come away with an Irish studies minor because I was two classes short, I feel like I walked away from the country with a knowledge of its essence.

Forgive me if it's a bit difficult to explain what I had learned in a years time in just one short blog. I guess the easiest way to explain how I felt is to recall one of the most ancient symbols of Ireland from the Celts... the spiral...

(The Celtic Spiral symbol inside the famous Newgrange burial mound)

Dr. Auge taught us through James Joyce that the culture of Ireland has a spiraling quality... that the music, the art, the literature, the history, the dance, and the people all swirl and spiral together. That they all coexist and help define one another and that there is a sense of repetition... a timeless and never ending quality to both the agonies and ecstasies of the Irish people. I didn't understand what Dr. Auge and James Joyce were trying to say fully until I actually went to Ireland and FELT it for myself.

When walking down O'Connell street, you may pass the general post office, there you may touch the bullet holes left from the 1916 Easter Rising. In the window of the GPO, there is a statue of Finn MacCool tied to a tree... from one of the ancient folk lores of the country. In Merrion Square you will pass a statue of Oscar Wilde, on Grafton you'll pass Floggin Molly. At Sandymount station there is a plaque that describes that this was the station mentioned in Joyce's Dubliners. In pubs and football and rugby games, you will here the people sing "The Fields of Athenry". Some people still name their children "Naimh" and "Oisin" after the legend of Finn MacCool's son and his wife from Tir na nog. You may hear people in the pubs recalling the terrible Troubles... or how Ireland used to be a third world country before the Celtic Tiger. Ancient ruins, Catholic and Protestant churches, rainbows appearing just as much as you'd imagine them to, hearing the bodhran thump and pound in the pubs, watching the buskers perform on Grafton Street, the travelers (gypsies) playing their tambourines and accordions on the train and being shunned by the locals... it all made sense to me because I understood their context. I understood the why.

Where as someone who had not been educated in Irish history and culture might hear the name "Niamh and "Oisin" and simply think, "Those must be old Gaelic names", I understand they come from the folklore. Someone might see the travelers be shunned from society as they beg for money and might not even realize they are modern day gypsies and think they are simply poor beggars... I know the prejudice that many of the Irish have towards the traveling community and view them as the lowest of the low. Someone may hear "The Fields of Athenry" and think, "that's a nice drinking song", but I know that it is about the four provinces of Ireland and how the Irish won the freedom for 3 of the four... Northern Ireland still belongs to England.

There's another example: phrases. The Irish might use the phrase, "she/he's away with the fairies" to mean that she/he is crazy or has their head in the clouds. This comes from the myth of the sidhe and the fairy folk being evil and mischievous and stealing away children and changing their minds. Many Irish children are still brought up fearful of the fairies, just like children in America may be afraid of the boogyman.

Everything from street signs to architecture to phrases, all spiral deep into and from Ireland's history, and if I hadn't been taught how to see it, it would all just mold into the background and i would miss out on so much!

***

Because I had a basis knowledge of the country and culture through what I had learned in class and in Ireland, I was able to participate as an active learner and partook in a project to study the ethnography of Dublin City Protests. Kelsey McElroy, Michele Gelaude, and I all attended several protests throughout the city and interviewed people about their cause.

(Kelsey and I at the Student Protest in January)

One of my favorite protests that we studied were the Dublin Taxi protests. Pretty much, because the economy is bad, it is so easy to obtain a taxi license, and because there was a flow of immigrants from places such as Poland and Nigeria, there are now more taxiz in Dublin than in New York City! Taxi drivers are furious with the over abundance of taxis and the fact that they make so little a night. So for weeks they protested by driving through the streets of Dublin honking in procession and striking. Because of my previous knowledge of the prejudice against Nigerians and other immigrants when I read the book "The Departees" for my Auge class, i was able to better understand the perspective of some of the drivers we interviewed.

(Both pictures are from one of the several taxi protests we went to in March of 2010)

When the three of us returned to the States, Kelsey, Michele, and I presented our project to Loras College to share what we had learned about protests in Dublin, and it was well received by our teachers and fellow students.

In addition to this public project on protests, I also learned to share what i had learned in other ways. I went to meetings and talked with the students who were to go on the next Ireland trip and I shared my advice with them. I wrote several poems and essays about my experiences and reflections regarding Ireland and made part of my thesis about it. I publicly read it at the Thesis reading in May. I also kept an in depth blog during my semester in Dublin, and from it you might get a better perspective of what I learned there. You may read it here:

http://duhawksinireland.com/?cat=11