Does that Cost Include Green Beer?

With St. Patrick's Day fast approaching many are planning to enjoy a day full of green beer. While taking some time off of work and paying your bar tab may hurt your bank account, your cost is nothing compared to the money spent by Irish officials each year.

Irish broadcast network, RTE, published an article today exposing that Irish officials spend about over 560,000 euros, or about $860,000 to travel aboard for the holiday of the country's most well-known saint.

Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minster) Bertie Ahern defended the expenditures, which included lavish hotel rooms and expense airfare, telling RTE that taxpayers are getting a return on the goodwill trips. Many of the trips were to destinations in the US. Of course making Americans think that the Irish are more drunk that they already believe is sure to have big payoffs.

The Glorious image that is the MR

Where are you from?: Politics of Location in Northern Ireland

I have not posted on this blog in more than a year but I wanted to put a brief post today. Its not a permanent return to this outpost but a reflection on something relevant to the trip that started it all.

This morning, actually afternoon in Ireland/UK, a officer of the Northern Irish police, the PSNI was shoot outside a school. The officer was a Catholic, a group that for most of its history was essentially banned from joining the PSNI. The act is being blamed on dissidents, whom I would assume seeing joining the police force that is accused of collusion to harm Catholics as selling out. I could give a long historical view of the situation but I just want to comment on one fact.

If you read RTE's, the Irish press, report the attack happened in the city of Derry. If you hoop over the the BBC's Northern Ireland coverage, you see the attack happened in Londonderry. No, there has been no mistake its just that people don't agree on what to call the place.

I visited (London)Derry while in Northern Ireland. It's a deeply divided city where Catholics and Protestants are literally divided by a river. Its also the city where Bloody Sunday happened and Irish Catholics have declared the area "Free Derry."

I was, and still, am stunned how absolutely everything in Northern Ireland is politicized. In fact as a blogger at ogra shinn fein, which calls itself the "official blog of Irish Republican Youth," a protest was held in July to have the city's name officially changed.

So you cannot even talk about where you are from without revealing a possible religious/political affiliation. Talk about problems for discourse.

Return to campus

Hi all,

I don't really update this blog too often anymore but I wanted to get in a quick word. I have returned to school at UofM. After an amazing summer in Dublin, it seems odd to be back in A2.

I have gotten really busy, especially from my work at the Michiagn Review. It is a bi-weekly student publication that I write for. I suggest you check it out:Micigan Review.

I am trying to put up a profile pic so here goes.

Cherio, Chaps

Pictures from Top to
bottom: Me on top of
St. Paul's Cathedral,
Buckingham Palace from
Palace Gardens
Big Ben.
No real time to write now
So I hope picture suffice.

A week in Northern Ireland

Pictures: (top left) me at the Giant's Causeway, (top right) a mural in the city of Derry commemerating the events of Bloody Sunday, (bottom) view climbing up to the Carric-a-kee rope bridge.

I just returned from my weeklong trip to Northern Ireland. I spent a week in Belfast and then this weekend in Londonderry (or Derry- that difference in name actually means a lot to people and demonstrates the large degree that everything is polarized by the Unionist-Nationalist divide). Our trip coincided with a rare 30 degree heat wave (translating to about 86 degree F). Although not really all that hot for summer, I must be adapting to the weather b/c it sure felt hot.

In Belfast, I stayed at Queens University. I was a very old looking gothic set of buildings. Our housing accomidations were single dorm rooms with a shared kitchen space. Queens was nice altough a bit removed from the city center. Our program managed to pack a lot of events into the week, so I am a bit exaushted at the moment. We visited Belfast City Hall and had a "reception" with the Lord Mayor (it was really just presenting us with a plaque and then a tour). We took a full-day excursion to the Giant's Causeway and the Carric-a-kee Rope bridge. Both of these coastal spots were amazing. The Causeway is a natuaral phonemon that produces highly regular 5 and 6-sided stones that pattern the coastline. Plus it is surrounded by huge cliff sides. The Rope Bridge, obviously took some effort in design, connects a part of the coast to a smaller island and provides breathtaking views of the Atlantic coast. I never realized that ocean water was really that blue.

No visit to Northern Ireland could be complete without an examination of the pecular events that have shaped its history. Since the partition of Ireland in the 1920's, there have been alternating periods of tension and relative peace. Much of Belfast was bombed out in WWII, so much of the sites, such as city hall have been largley reconstructed. The violence of the Troubles still looms large here. One of our day tours was a visit to local murals. Murals have become a way to express almost any feeling about this violence from calls for peace to continued celebration of IRA, UFF, UDA, etc paramilitaries that caused chaos in the city. I must admitt that the type of neighborhoods that housed Belfast's murals were very run-down. As one of my peers put it "its a bit like a gang war, where you put your gang colors on your house." It was always clear if you were in an Unionist or Nationalist (more commonly and less aduquitely grouped as Protestant and Catholic) area based on either Union Jacks or Irish tricolor flags hanging from lamposts and shop windows. Sadly, although as our tour guide put it "things have gotten much better", there are still clear demarcations of territory made even more acute by the erection of so-called "peace walls" that seperete some neighborhoods.

Not that the story, is all gloom but it has a long way to go. We finished the week by taking a trip to Stormont (the N. Ie. Parliment). It was a beatiful building that hasn't held a single session of Parliment in several years. The UK government at Westminster has been struggling to get a devolved Parliment up and running but hasn't been able to do so. Our round table discussions with members of 3 of the 4 major parties showed why polarization is still a problem.

Now back in Dublin, and have finally moved into my last housing accomidations for the trip. So I don't have to move again. I will be traveling to London next week, I cannot wait.

Dail Eireann, Kilmainham Gaol

Hi all,

In my last post, I commented that I would be taking a visit to Dail Eireann (the Irish parliament) and it turned out to be a fun trip. Our group got to meet with the head of one of the Irish third parties, the Labour Party. Oddly enough, this is one of the few Irish parties that has an English name. The two primary parties (that I am spelling wrong) Finna Fial and Finna Gail both have Irish names. I should know what they mean but have forgotten. We had a Q&A with Mr. Rabbitte, the Labour leader, while he tried to answer our questions, like most politicians he dodged really saying anything concrete. I was shocked to hear him, and later one of our guest lectures, refer to the their "welfare state." Opinions aside, no one in the US would ever self-describe our government as a "welfare state", except as a form of attack against a proposed policy. In Ireland though, politicians can openly talk about the benefits of such a mentality. Sadly, when we took our actual tour of the facilities our guide was a bit boring and we couldn't take any pictures. I wish I had some photos to share because the place was full of ornate design.

Yesterday, our group took a tour of Kilmainham Gaol (Gaol= jail). Its a famous Dublin landmark in the way I would guess Alcatrz is in the States. The most important thing about the jail is its connection to political imprisonments. Charles Stuart Parnell, who was a British MP and argued for Irish Home rule, was imprisoned there. Also the leaders of the Easter 1916 rising were executed at the Gaol. I have been inundated with 1916 right now, both in literature and history class and in seeing the film The Wind That Shakes the Barley (about the civil war that proceeds it).

This will most likely be my last post until I return from Belfast. Sadly, I won't have easy Internet access up in the North. I can get on a bit but I will most likely just be checking e-mail and not writing a lot. I won't be back from Belfast until the end of next week.