Tag: Ireland

By kathleenmccarthy1

This weekend, I had my first visitor from back home come to see me in Galway. My friend from GW who is studying in Florence, Italy came to visit me during her fall break. She arrived just after I turned in two midterm papers so I was exhausted but very excited for the weekend ahead. The first night she was here was Halloween, so she got a very intense and authentic first taste of Galway. Since Galway’s population is heavily made up of students, the streets are full of people on Halloween dressed up for the occasion. I think this was a great first day to be in Galway because it really gave my friend an idea of the personality that Galway has. The next day, I let my friend explore Galway a bit while I went to class and then in the afternoon we went to the Galway City Museum. After visiting the museum with my friend, I wished that I had gone earlier. Not only did it teach me a lot about the city I’ve been living in for over two months in a very short period of time, it was also free. That night we had an amazing dinner and took in some live music at one of the pubs in town but were in bed early because we had a much bigger adventure planned for the next day.

For the following day, I booked a tour of the Connemara region of Ireland that included a trip to Kylemore Abbey. Connemara is a region in the westernmost part of Ireland known for its scenic beauty and preservation of Irish indigenous culture. It is also where the movie “The Quiet Man” was filmed. As the bus drove us through Connemara, I couldn’t believe it was a real place. The enormous mountains and majestic lakes made it feel more like a fairy tale than reality. Adding to my disbelief in Connemara was our visit to Kylemore Abbey, a one-time family mansion now home to a cloister of nuns. This imposing Victorian castle in the wilderness was build in the late 1800s by a man named Mitchell Henry as a gift to his wife (all the makings of a fairy tale, right?) and became renowned all over the world for its grandiose. I asked out loud, for about the millionth time since I’ve been in Ireland “How is this place real?”

On Sunday, I wanted to do a little more exploring in Galway with my friend so I took her to the Galway Cathedral before heading over to the Salthill Promenade. This is a walk along the Galway Bay that is incredibly scenic and leads to the Galway Aquarium, which we also ended up paying a visit to. After that, we came home and baked a pie, which is one of many habits I’ve picked up here, and my friend boarded a bus to make the long trip back to the Dublin airport. Many people would say that our weekend was full of typical tourist behavior and that taking in multiple nature sites was repetitive and unnecessary, but I think it was really important for me to have a weekend like this. In the past few weeks, things have gotten so hectic with assignments, trips outside of the country and making arrangements for the spring semester back at GW that the spark in my relationship with Galway really did seem to go out. Everything had started to seem ordinary and routine and I had stopped appreciating it in the electrifying way that I had in the beginning. Showing someone my favorite things in Galway, the things that I am going to miss the most, made me realize just how well I’ve gotten to know this place. Seeing someone from home also made me see all the changes that I’ve gone through since I’ve been here. I feel like some people might find me utterly unrecognizable when I go home, which is both scary and exciting. Hosting a visitor in Galway was just what I needed to realize how amazing this experience is and how lucky I am to have met so many amazing people and have the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen so accessible to me. I am truly living the dream.

By kathleenmccarthy1

The last two weeks have been a complete whirlwind for me. Not only have they been two of the busiest so far in terms of schoolwork, my parents were also visiting and my final exams schedule came out. This means that I had to balance loads of assignments with giving my parents attention and figuring out how I am going to spend my last weeks in Ireland. As stressful as they were, these two weeks actually ended up being really amazing and were almost a defining part of this semester.

For me, the best part about my parents’ visit was that they brought my grandmother with them. My grandmother has lived across the street from me for my entire life and we have always been very close. My grandmother immigrated to the US from County Galway when she was 16, almost 60 years ago.  Having my grandmother visit me in her native country was incredible for so many reasons. I went to the house that she was born in, where her brother still lives, saw the church that she and my grandfather were married in and ate in a restaurant that she worked in. I got to see a snapshot of her life before she came to America and understand what her formative years looked like.

I also got to meet a number of relatives that I probably wouldn’t have been able to meet if I hadn’t come to Ireland to study. While my parents were visiting, I got too meet two of my grandmother’s sisters and two of her brothers as well as two of her first cousins and three of my second cousins. It was so striking to see how similar my grandmother an her siblings were and how much they even reminded me of their own stateside relatives that they themselves had never met. It was also a very emotional experience because many of them had not seen each other in several years. My grandmother had not been to Ireland in five years and my mom had not been to Ireland since she was 8. This meant that pretty much all of my mom’s aunts and uncles on her mother’s side hadn’t seen her since she was a child. While we were in Ireland, my mom met three of her first cousins for the first time.

The experience of being able to see my grandmother revisit her home made me understand her experience a lot more than I had before. The night before my parents left to go home, my grandmother’s sister stayed over at our hotel and she and my grandmother sat up talking for most of the night just like me and my brother do when I come home from college for breaks. They gossiped with each other like two sisters that hadn’t been apart for years. When it was time for my aunt to leave, they both cried, not knowing when they would see each other again. For the first time, I began to understand just how emotional leaving Ireland to come to America all those years ago must have been. I started to see just how hard it was for my grandmother to spend those first years without her family. Without the experience of having my parents and grandmother come and visit me in Ireland, I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate the things that she had done in the way that I do now. The time that I spent with my family added so much meaning to my experience of studying abroad. The fact that I’ve been able to come to my grandmother’s homeland, experience it as a student and understand the Irish diaspora through the context of my peers is the most incredible thing that has ever happened to me and I am beyond grateful that I was able to do this.

Back to where it all began #GWU #GWAbroad

By kathleenmccarthy1

Last weekend, I made my first trip outside of the Republic of Ireland since arriving at the end of August. I was in London from Thursday to Sunday visiting my friend studying at King’s College. It was also the first time I made a trip by myself within Europe so I was a little on the nervous side. Since London can be very confusing, I insisted that my friend pick me up from Heathrow Airport. The trip from the airport to his apartment was almost two hours long since we had to take the tube and then an additional bus. This meant that my travel time from Heathrow Airport to my friend’s apartment was roughly the same as the travel time between my apartment and the Shannon Airport, which is the airport that I flew out of. The crazy thing about this is that my apartment is 85 kilometers away from the Shannon Airport whereas my friend’s apartment is only 28 kilometers away from Heathrow. Living in Ireland, I had become accustomed to needing to travel for a long period of time to get places, but those were cases in which I was traveling across long distances. I had forgotten how time consuming travelling within a city can be since it never takes more than 15 minutes to get anywhere in Galway.

My visit to London also marked the first time I has ever been overwhelmed upon entering a new city. Before I came to GW, I lived in Philadelphia for my whole life and I’ve been to pretty much every major city in the US. I think that if I had just gone to London on a trip while living back in the states, it might not have been so overwhelming, but going to London from Galway made me feel completely out of my element. I have to say, there was a number of times this weekend that I was sick of going from place to place and just wanted to be back in Galway. That being said, it was nice to see so many new things and visit with my friend, who is the first person I know from the states that I’ve seen while abroad. I also found the living situation at King’s College to be a bit of a culture shock. My friend lives in a first-year hall (equivalent to a freshman dorm in the states) that is composed entirely of single rooms with a shared kitchen and bathroom on each floor.  The kitchen serves as a common area where kids will not just cook and eat, but also hang out and socialize. The students keep very little food in their rooms so pretty much every time they want a snack, they must go to the common room, which is what makes it such a popular hangout. This is a very stark contrast from the living situation in Gort na Coiribe Student Village, which is where I have been staying in Galway. Gort is a large village of townhouses comprised of private apartments within each. These apartments all have kitchens, living rooms and bathrooms and house a varying number of students between apartments. I live in a three-person apartment with one bathroom. Myself and another American girl share one bedroom while our Irish roommate has her own. We don’t really interact with our neighbors because there really isn’t any need to. Most of the people we’ve met in Gort have been through our roommate and the other Americans in the Arcadia program. Even though our living situation doesn’t really give us access to as many people as a traditional college living situation would, I think that this has allowed us to form a much stronger bond with our roommate. Irish culture is very home-centered and you can see that both in the fact that Irish college students will typically go home on the weekends and in how student housing is set up. As soon as they get to college, Irish students will eat and live together much like the way a family does. They have a dining room table where they share meals and when you look in the windows in student villages you will see the kids watching TV together on the couch like a family.  As nice as the personal space that my friend enjoys in his dorm at King’s College, I’m very grateful for the experience that I’ve been able to have with student housing in Ireland. I really enjoyed my weekend in London and I am so happy that I had the opportunity to see a place that so many people dream of going to. However, the best part, for me, was realizing just how much I missed Galway and just how at home I feel here now.

By kathleenmccarthy1

As a college student, I don’t really get much time to watch TV. When I do, it’s usually in the form of binge watching on Netflix or sitting down to watch a show that I regularly follow when it comes on every week. It has been a really long time since I just sat and watched television because there was nothing else to do or turned on the TV and actively looked for something to watch. In Ireland, however, most people turn on the TV as soon as they come home and turn off the TV right before they go to bed. The TV is almost always on in every Irish living room and most conversations are held with the TV on. At first, I had a hard time adjusting to this. In the US, it’s considered rude to be talking to someone and watching TV at the same time. Over time, I’ve actually gotten really used to the TV (or as they say here, the telly) being on all the time and it even feels a little weird when it’s not on. If there doesn’t happen to be anything particularly good on at any given time, my roommates and I will typically put on Starz, which is a music channel that will just play the most popular current songs on repeat. This has led me to unofficially rename our apartment “Club 36” because we have pop music playing all the time. Coming in from class to see music videos playing kind of takes me back to when I was in middle school and I would watch TRL after school, so my experience has been nostalgic in a weird way. Another thing that I find nostalgic about the television culture here is the commercials. In the US, commercials have changed a lot on the past few years. A lot of them now are really subtle and infused with indie music. The commercials in Ireland, however, are mostly geared and making people laugh at feature a lot of slapstick humor, sort of like the ones I used to see in the US when I was younger. You will often hear Irish people talking about what commercials they think are funny or asking their friends if they’ve seen the new commercial for something. Also, many Irish people have told me that a good way of coming to understand their culture is through watching a show called Father Ted. Father Ted is basically the Full House of Ireland because it was a show that aired in the 90s and has since been cancelled. However, absolutely everyone has seen mostly every episode and still makes jokes from it. shortly after we arrived, my Irish roommate actually showed us an episode on Youtube so that we could get what everyone is talking about. I also attended a kayak club meeting where they showed us an episode of Father Ted so that the visiting students would pick up on some of the jokes that the club makes. As nice as it has been to get well acclimated to Ireland’s TV-watching culture, one of the things that worries me now about going back to the US is all of the time I’m probably going to spend with the TV on when I get home.

By kathleenmccarthy1

As much as I love GW, I often find myself, as many of my fellow Washingtonians do, getting just a little tired of the way that politics can constantly invade other aspects of our everyday lives. This is truer than ever in wake of the government shutdown. As expected, coming to Ireland has provided a break from the type of intense political divides that we can often see in the US. However, what has surprised me most about Ireland is not just that it has its own deeply divisive political matters, but that people with differing views are actually able to coexist with each knowing full well that the people around them don’t agree with them even remotely.

When I arrived in Ireland, the nation was on the eve of a referendum vote to abolish the Seanad, which is one of the houses of the Irish Parliament. The Seanad has weaker powers than the Dail, the other house in Ireland’s parliament and can’t actually veto any legislation, just delay it. Abolishing the Seanad would reduce the number of politicians and subsequently free up funds to replenish Ireland’s struggling economy. During the 2011 election for Taioseach, or Irish Prime Minister, the Fine Gael party promised that if they were to take office, they would pursue a referendum to abolish the Seanad. When the Fine Gael candidate, Enda Kenny, won the election, his administration continued with the agenda to hold the referendum to have the Seanad abolished, which was scheduled for October 4^th.  Throughout Ireland, you could see posters advocating both the abolition of the Seanad (produced by the Fine Gael party for the most part) as well as some advocating for the continuation of the Seanad (largely produced by the Fianna Fail party). When I participated in a homestay for a weekend, the family that I stayed with shared with me that they were in favor of getting rid of the Seanad because, they found it to be a waste of money when it had, what many considered, little impact on governance. My Irish roommate also mentioned that she would be voting in favor of abolishing the Seanad and said that it was very likely that most Irish people would vote that way as well.

I also had some lecturers weigh in on the referendum as the vote loomed closer. For example, my political science lecturer is actually an adjunct lecturer who works full time as a lobbyist. He is currently working on the campaign to keep the Seanad. As we were leaving class the day before the referendum, he actually stopped all of us before we could leave the room to hand us some literature on this issue and asked us to vote in favor of keeping it. My history professor also asked our class who would be voting in the upcoming referendum. Since my history class is filled predominantly with visiting students from other countries, only about five people in the class raised their hands. He then asked them who would be voting to keep it and who would be voting to abolish it, with both groups answering by a show of hands. After asking this question, he just went back to lecturing without using the referendum as any sort of jumping off point.

There are a number of things that I find striking about the referendum. The first is the fact that in just a little over two years, a bill to abolish one of the parliamentary houses and drastically change the constitution has been drafted, published, approved by the government and brought to an official vote without any interference. I’m also amazed that such large-scale government changes can be enacted so fast. Were Fine Gael to be successful in this referendum, Ireland would go from having a two-house parliament to a one-house parliament, just like that. Another thing that strikes me about the whole situation is that it isn’t taboo to talk about it at all. A professor distributing materials on a political campaign he is personally involved with and could benefit from would be considered highly inappropriate in the US, but here no one had a problem with it at all. Everyone in the class just politely accepted and said “Thank you.” If a professor asked his students to share how they would be voting in an upcoming election openly in class, it would be at least somewhat controversial and even be called unethical by some. I was also struck by the fact that there were people literally sitting right next to each other who openly admitted that they would be voting differently and no comments were made whatsoever. No snide remarks, nothing offensive, no dirty looks. No one seemed to have any problem with the people around them having an opinion that completely opposes theirs.

In the end, the Irish government ended up retaining the Seanad after an incredibly close vote with 51.7% of voters in favor of keeping it and 48.3% wishing to abolish it. Even though I won’t be able to say that I lived in Ireland when the Seanad was abolished, being here for this important election has not just helped me in learning how the Irish government is structured, but also about Irish political culture and how people here approach politics.

By kathleenmccarthy1

At NUIG, you spend a lot of time trying to get away from the other American students. With such a high international student population and a heavy presence of American study abroad programs on campus, the opportunity to be surrounded by only Irish students even for a short while does not come around often. This is why I believed that there would be a considerable number of American students in the sociology seminar that I registered for. However, when the class, entitled: Contemporary Irish Health Care Policy in a Comparative Context, began, I discovered that apart from a German student who was also taking it, everyone else in the class was Irish.

My health care policy seminar is the only class in which there is not a large population of visiting students. In fact, with 13 students in total, it is the only one that doesn’t take place in a large lecture hall. This means that the professor will actually learn our names and get to know us as individuals instead of just talking at us for the entire lecture like the professors in Ireland typically do. Obviously, since it is still relatively early on in the semester, the professor does not know all of the students’ names yet. He has, however, known one student’s name from the first day of class and that student is me. The reason for this is that, as the only American in the class, I am the go-to girl for questions about free market health care policy.

Even at GW, it is unusual for a professor to address me directly and know my name during the first lecture. This is why it took me back when, during our first class, the professor looked right at, called me by my name and asked me about public health care options in the US. Getting questions like this one would have been intimidated to get even back at GW, but in the states it would only be out of fear of embarrassment or concern over having it reflect poorly on my grades. In Ireland, my answers to these questions will shape my classmates’ understanding of American health care policy and, subsequently, their understanding of global health care policy. I feel as though I have essentially become a guest lecturer in my sociology class, completely by accident.

With my health care policy class meeting on Thursday mornings, my Wednesday nights have essentially turned into a briefing session on new developments in American health care policy. This might seem excessive and unnecessary but anyone who has been on Twitter lately can attest to the fact that this topic is not one that you want to ignore for a few days if you have any intention of discussing it with someone. I basically need to prepare for a class presentation on American health care policy every week, but I’m never really sure of the aspect of health care policy that I will be presenting on. Fortunately, both the professor and the other students in the class are incredibly warm and understanding and seem pleased that there is an American in the class to contribute to the discussion. Even though I’m sure they would be really nice about it if I had nothing to say, I’m going to be asked to contribute whether I like it or not. So, I might as well give 110%.

By kathleenmccarthy1

Many people don’t know this, but the Irish don’t refer to their Prime Minister as “the Prime Minister.” Instead, Ireland’s Prime Minister is called the “Taoiseach” which means “chief” in Ireland’s native language and by being in the right place at the right time, I got to meet the Taoiseach last weekend.

The Arcadia program managers arranged for us to participate in a homestay weekend in Castlebar, County Mayo, about an hour and a half away from Galway City. Heather, another girl in the Arcadia program, and I were assigned to the Reilly family, consisting of a woman named Marie and her husband, John. Also living with them was Jannick, a German high school student spending the semester in Ireland.  Our first night was a little awkward. Jannick was much younger than us and Marie and John were much older than us, so it was difficult to keep up conversation. After we had dinner on Friday night, we watched the Late Late show, a popular Irish talk show that plays every Friday. To give us background on some of that episode’s content, Marie explained to us that the current Taoiseach is pushing to have the Seanad, one of the two houses of the Irish parliament abolished. I brought up that I had seen Enda Kenny, the current Taoiseach, at GW when he visited this past March. To this, Marie responded “Enda? He’s from Castlebar! His son goes to school with Jannick! They ride the same bus!” This completely blew me away and I found it impossible to keep my inner-fangirl in check. Marie was delighted that her American guest was so excited about meeting someone who knows the Taoiseach, especially since Enda Kenny is the first person from any part of west Ireland to hold the title. She said that the next day she would take us into town and show us his constituency office. She also told us that she would call her dad to see if he knew whether or not the Taoiseach would be in town that weekend even though she was pretty sure he would be in Dublin.

As we ate breakfast the next morning, Marie called her father, who actually knows Enda Kenny pretty well, to see if he could tell her whether or not the Taoiseach would be in his office that day. To find out, Marie’s father called Enda Kenny, who agreed to meet with us in town around noon.  Knowing I would be really excited about this, Marie came running into the kitchen as Heather and I were eating breakfast and said “Girls, you’re never going to believe this! Enda is going to meet us in town for a coffee!” I was so excited that I actually threw my hands up and squealed in front of this woman that I had met less than 24 hours before. I could not believe that I was actually going to meet Ireland’s Prime Minister and one-time President of the Council of the EU.

Marie drove Heather and I into town to the café where we had been told to meet him.  We got there a few minutes early so we sat in the car to wait for the Taoiseach to arrive. As we waited, Heather and I got to know Marie a lot better.  She told us about what she usually does on Saturday and also about her family and living in Castlebar. Even though Marie said she expected Enda Kenny to arrive in his wife’s car, he was actually walking up the street when we saw him.  Marie got out of the car and walked to to greet him as Heather and I walked timidly behind her.  Upon seeing her, Enda Kenny said “Marie! So good to see you!” and gave her a big hug. He then looked at us and said, “Are these your American guests?” Marie introduced us and we each got our own hugs from him. “I’ve known Marie since she was this tall,” he said, “You could not have a better host.” We expressed our agreement with this statement and then he said, “One thing that you should know about Ireland is this: everyone in this country knows each other.” Instead of going into the café and having a coffee as planned, we walked to the park across the street where Enda Kenny pointed out various buildings in the town square and explained to us the history behind them. After that, we sat down on a bunch and the Taoiseach called one of is security men over to take a picture. He asked if any of us had a camera. I offered up my iPhone, in its bright green vintage-inspired cassette tape phone case. As his security guard held the phone up to take the picture, Enda Kenny said, “Is that a cassette tape?” When I bought my iPhone case, I would never have guessed in a million years that Enda Kenny would be making fun of it. After taking pictures, the Taoiseach asked us what we were studying in school. When Heather told him that she was studying English literature, he said “You know, when we were visited by the Queen a while back, I said to her ‘Since gaining independence, look at all of the Nobel Laureates we’ve had. Beckett, Shaw, Yeats; the Irish have taken the English language and made it better.’”

After that, our time with Enda Kenny had come to an end. He, of course, gave us all another hug and told Marie he would see her again soon.  As he walked back to the car that had brought him there, a motorist driving by stopped their car to shake his hand. I found this so reflexive of Ireland’s culture of openness and accessibility. The Taoiseach, who is responsible for leading the entire country and handling foreign affairs, took time out of his day to meet with people he had never met. Up until then, I had thought that what people had told me about Irish hospitality had been somewhat overestimated. Sure I found that people were generally nice, but there didn’t seem to be much beyond common courtesy. After my experience with the Taoiseach, I realized just how warm Irish people genuinely are and how doing nice things for people is an established part of the culture. It also exemplified just how strong community ties are in Ireland. Being an important public figure doesn’t make you exempt from doing favors for friends and neighbors, it’s expected of everyone. And yet, everyone seems happy to do it.