Teaching the Troubles at NHA: A Day of Human Connections

Saul becomes fast friends with an Amnesty International volunteer in Limerick

An "I am from" poem from the office wall at Narrative 4

A wall plaque on O'Connell Street in Limerick

James Lawlor and Amee O'Connor Berkery of Narrative 4 set the context for our day as we interviewed them in the morning. Their deep belief in the ability of human beings to make connections across barriers of country, class, gender and race served as an inspiration that Dave and I kept coming back to as we made our way up the Galway Road from Limerick to Galway City.

A twenty year old Amnesty International volunteer stopped us on the street to talk about the subject of pro-choice in Ireland and the conversation instead turned into considerations of what it is to be Irish or American or British in the contemporary world before we exchanged email addresses so that he will be able to do social action work with our students in America; a Virginia Eisenhower Republican (American Republican, not Irish Republican) and First Lieutenant from the Vietnam Period engaged this lifelong Yankee Democrat (Saul) in conversation at St. Mary's Cathedral in Limerick, about his disenchantment with militarism and the odd moments of camaraderie among strangers (as an engineer, he was once embraced by a factory worker when an invention of his allowed this man to see the person working next to him for the first time in twenty years); I detected my own deceased father's sort of brushstrokes in the work of the Irishman Jack Yeats at the Hunt Museum; international social justice advocate Anna Visser took time away from her family vacation to meet us in her childhood hometown in the Burren to have coffee under the blue sky outside a hilltop cafe and talk about Irish education, the psychology of a formerly colonized state and the way in which our mutual friend--the United Nations Human Rights advocate Claude Cahn--has a knack for connecting us to good people all over the world.

Once arrived in Galway, a middle eastern immigrant pizza counter man opened up to us about his medical studies and his dream of being the one to find recognition and a cure for fibromyalgia in Ireland.

After mixed results with the music pubs on the Latin Quarter in Galway, we stumbled upon an excellent traditional music pub on the Salthill side of the Quay, where an audience member made us all smile and laugh with an impromptu a cappella song that was the highlight of our evening adventure.

Please enjoy the song here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a06zeGp86Rg

As I type this, the owner of the Eyre Square cafe where I am working--in reference to the passing of a good friend--tells a customer, "You know what they say, don'tcha? We're not here for a long time; we're here for a good time." Indeed we are.