Mic Christopher Tribute Concert

Last night marked the ten year anniversary of the death of Mic Christopher, a beloved member of the Irish music community. He started busking (performing music for money) on Grafton Street (the main shopping street in Dublin, like Chicago’s Michigan Avenue) and around Dublin when he was 15 years old and was adopted into the music scene, playing with a number of Irish musicians and bands including the Frames and later founding the Mary Janes. After a performance in Grongingen, the Netherlands, a decade ago, he fell down a flight of stairs, hit his head, and was comatose for 11 days before he died on November 29, 2001.

It was a huge loss for the Irish music scene, so ten years later, his friends and some of his music idols got together to play a charity tribute concert. Glen Hansard, Mic’s best friend and one-time flatmate (some of you may know him from the movie Once - he's also in this photo playing a song with Mic Scott), seemed to organize the event and it was incredibly moving to see the way so many people who had looked up to Mic, called him a friend, and also those who Mic had looked up to, gathered together to sing – including at various times his daughter and father on stage as well. To give you a taste, here's a video of Mic and Glen busking on Grafton Street singing Mic's hit song "Heyday."

Not being a huge music aficionado myself, here or in the States, I’m glad my Nashville music-loving friend Christen told me about the show. We got up to the 2nd row (so I could see!), had a very Irish night, and saw one heck of a great value show!

Need Directions?

So on the way back from Fanore today, we stopped on the side of the road in town to consult the map for…if not fastest route back, then most scenic to Dublin. Within about 30 seconds, a kind man knocked on my window and asked if he could give us directions. Stuff like this is why I love Ireland.

So we set off on the scenic route that he assured us all the locals took – just 3 miles down the road, take a right at the circle with the flowerbeds, and a left after that. It’s faster than the main road, and has the best view in the country of Galway Bay. It’s not a T-intersection when you turn left though, just a left.

So we more or less followed those directions. Matt began to doubt just a bit after mile 5, but we did find the flowerbed a little further down, the correct left at a T-intersection, and one beautiful view. Lesson: ask the locals – they know!

Cliffs of Moher and Public Houses

Our little excursion of the day today was out to visit the Cliffs of Moher. I was last there exactly two years ago when I visited my friend Elyse, who was studying in Galway at the time, over Thanksgiving break.

The cliffs haven’t changed much and I have to say, neither has the weather. We got lucky today though – it was windy and overcast, but in 2009, we caught a day that was windy, overcast, and absolutely pouring down rain, so I’m calling it a win.

We stopped in Doolin on the way back for a couple of pints by the fireplace in a local pub. I’d heard the stories of pubs – ‘public houses’ – being family friendly in Ireland, but hadn’t yet had occasion to find out for myself. It was amazing to experience. We walked in from the wind to the warmth and smell of a coal fire, and found a table just next to it. The pub had a highchair for Robbie, candy for the boys, and pints for the adults. The boys sat with us for a bit to do a puzzle and have some chips (French fries), then ran around the pub playing and giggling and amusing the rest of the pub-goers – truly, everyone from the college students at the table to the old man at the bar were watching them have a good time with a smile on their faces. Not something I’m used to seeing in America by any means, and another reason I love Irish culture.

So Much to be Thankful for in Fanore

It’s hard to beat being home for the holidays. But I have to say, strolling along the roads and beaches of Fanore, discussing everything from the differences between Irish and American Christmas parties to how cows say “moo,” and pausing for the occasional photo under a rainbow comes pretty darned close. I’d definitely take it over the packed shopping malls of the American “Black Friday” phenomenon.

Yesterday was American Thanksgiving, and two of the Rotary families with American ties – Matt & MaryBeth Porter and Annie & Carter White – invited me along with them to celebrate the holiday with their 3 boys, au pair, and dog in the west coast village of Fanore.

Fanore is a one-pub town (in the States, we might call it a one-horse town, but there are in fact many cattle and horses in the immediate vicinity). But for Ireland, where even small towns seem to have at least 3 pubs, this is a small town. It’s really more of a summer vacation town near as I can tell, but we rented two houses with beautiful ocean vistas regardless of the season.

It was windy and rainy as we drove up yesterday and since we had to wait for the food delivery before getting on the road, we didn’t get in until dark, which made waking up this morning to a view out the window of the waves crashing onto the beach all the more majestic.

After unloading the cars last night we played with the boys and chatted over wine and cheese while the turkey finished cooking, and then sat down for a delicious meal of turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, roasted vegetables, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and of course, pumpkin pie. The fire, laughter, and love that warmed the house reminded me of Thanksgiving with my dad’s side at my uncle Jim and aunt Gina’s cottage on Lake Michigan and made me so happy to be in this atmosphere of ‘home away from home.’

In reflecting on the past year, I have so very many things to be thankful for, not the least of which is the opportunity the Rotary Foundation is affording me to spend this year in Ireland, and particularly the warm reception I’ve received from all Rotarians and especially those in the Dublin Central club, in welcoming me into their club, homes, and lives over these past few months. As this calendar year draws to a close, my academic year adventure in Ireland (now two months in) has only just begun and I am so excited to soak up every moment of the journey.

The Scholar Side: International Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect

As a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, I tend to focus more on the Rotary and ambassadorial portions in this blog – as the Rotary Foundation puts it, “furthering world understanding and peace through increasing awareness of and respect for cultural differences.” But another one of the program objectives, more along the scholar lines, is “developing leaders who can address the humanitarian needs of the world community,” so I figured I’d share a bit of the scholar side on occasion as well (also because my life this week has consisted primarily of commuting to and from class, my flat, and the library, and not so much of the fun travel/cultural insights side).

There are a number of ways that scholars in Ireland are addressing the humanitarian needs of the world through programs as varied as Race, Ethnicity, and Violence; Urban Planning with an emphasis on post-conflict settings; or International Management with a focus on increasing supply chain efficiency when delivering emergency food aid (decreasing the time it takes to get to food to the victims of famine or other natural disaster). As for my program, I chose to spend the year studying International Peace Studies.

So what exactly does that entail? Well, a variety of topics. This term, I have courses on the Politics of Peace and Conflict; the United Nations and Peacekeeping; Conflict Resolution and Nonviolence; and Ethics in International Affairs. The courses are marked (graded) a bit differently here than in the US, in the sense that my entire mark (grade) is based on a single 20-page paper written on one particular topic related to the course, rather than multiple shorter essays or attendance or facilitating discussions as is more common in the US.

At the moment, I’m writing a paper on the roles that the US and China played in the UN Security Council with regard to international intervention in the conflicts in the southern and western regions of Sudan for my class on the UN and Peacekeeping. In the wake of the mass atrocities of the 1990s that occurred in such states as Rwanda, Burundi, and the former Yugoslavia, a new set of international principles emerged called the Responsibility to Protect, which dictates that the government of each nation has a responsibility to protect its own citizens against mass atrocities, and the international community has a responsibility to assist the nation in doing so, but if a the government fails to protect its own citizens, the international community has a responsibility to intervene to stop the mass atrocities. (Note: the responsibility to protect, which provides justification for military intervention, should not be confused with humanitarian intervention, which aid organizations prefer to be strictly non-military and humanitarian only, such as the recent case of providing food and medicine to victims of famine in Somalia). Where the US was interested in fostering some sort of intervention in Darfur through the UN under the international norm of the Responsibility to Protect, China was only willing to do so if the government of Sudan was willing to accept a UN peacekeeping mission (which it was not), because such intervention against the will of the government would jeopardize the international principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, and China certainly didn’t want to enable future meddling of the international community into it’s own domestic affairs.

The desire on the part of the international community to broker a peaceful resolution to the conflict in the south of Sudan during the early 2000’s lead to inaction (or severely delayed action anyway) in Darfur, western Sudan, with regard to stopping the acts of ongoing genocide committed as the peace negotiators did not want to ostracize the government of Sudan in Khartoum. While individual member nations to the UN did assist with the peace negotiations that lead to the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the later creation of the independent nation of South Sudan on July 9, 2011, the UN Security Council itself did not intervene or invoke the principle of the Responsibility to Protect.

Arguing over the international principles of whether it’s legal to intervene is more of a constructivist argument, but of course, there were also the ‘realist’ arguments that the US had already committed its forces to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and couldn’t commit further troops to Sudan, and that Chinese interests own the vast majority of oil in Sudan, and international intervention would jeopardize those so of course China opposed intervention on those grounds as well. Still, these conflicting principles of whether or not to intervene in the domestic affairs of a sovereign nation when innocent people are being murdered at the hand of the state (or when the state is turning a blind eye and enabling non-state groups to commit the atrocities), and if so, at what point enough people have died to justify intervention, are (unfortunately) likely to continue arise in the international arena in the future.

One Essay Down (and that's all that matters for today)

So after several weeks of research into
- the structure of the United Nations;
- the UN Security Council;
- the mass atrocities in Darfur;
- the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that lead to the independent state of South Sudan this past summer;
- the roles of the US and China with the Security Council with respect to the ongoing mass atrocities in Darfur;
- the established international norms of non-interference and respect for state sovereignty (you don’t invade another country’s territory just because you feel like it)
- and the Responsibility to Protect (simply put, if a country isn’t protecting its own citizens, as in the case of the Rwandan genocide or the mass atrocities in Darfur, the international community has a responsibility to intervene to protect those citizens)

I have finally submitted my first essay in grad school – worth a shocking 100% of my grade in my “UN and Peacekeeping” class, analyzing the success of the UN in conflict resolution and peacekeeping in the case of Darfur.

I went out for a celebratory pint with my Burundian classmate Nestor and after about an hour, a musician showed up to provide some live entertainment. His second song of choice: You Can Call Me Al. It’s a song off Paul Simon’s Graceland CD that my Dad used to play in his car on our way to and from church when I was younger. Gotta love a little piece of home in Ireland…and globalization. And I have to say, it sounded good with an Irish accent.

Bringing American Thanksgiving to Ireland

So, have I mentioned yet that I love my program? There may be a few things I’d change about the Irish School of Ecumenics at Trinity, but the program does a nice job of recognizing that we are a class of mostly international students (I’d say maybe a quarter American, a quarter Irish, and the majority European, with a few students from Africa and Asia), and as such, organizes activities here and there to welcome us to Ireland. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it to the first event, but the second main event was a potluck held in conjunction with American Thanksgiving (ish).

The dinner was actually last night, a full week before Thanksgiving, but is likely to be the only Thanksgiving dinner I’ll be attending. The ISE provided the turkey, and the attendees signed up to bring the side dishes. We had all the traditional Thanksgiving food covered (mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, etc) but as an international potluck, we also some fun dishes like Chinese dessert dumplings in the shape of a rabbit! My contribution was a pumpkin dip (mix up pumpkin, whipped cream, all spice, and sugar and serve with strips of sugary pie crust or pretzels for a sweet/salty combo that tastes like pumpkin pie but takes less than half the time).

Bringing in the Irish culture, we had mince pies and ‘poppers’ which are gift-wrapped tubes (like a tootsie roll but bigger) and when you pull them apart, they make a flash-bang (surprising when you don’t know what it is and aren’t expecting it!), and inside you find a plastic crown and an incredibly corny joke like the kind you’d find on the back of a Laffy Taffy in the US.

Examples:
Q: What is white and goes up?
A: A confused snowflake!

Q: What goes “Oh, Oh, Oh”?
A: Santa when he’s going backwards!

All in all, there were about 50 of us in attendance – many of the International Peace Studies students, some from the Intercultural Theology and Interreligious Studies program, and most of the lecturers and support staff. Christen gave a nice toast at the end giving thanks for all that we had and were able to share. Kat, who spent the last year working on a Native American reservation in Montana, was also thankful to be sure, but helped ensure that we Americans accurately explained the holiday to our international friends less familiar with the tradition. After filling our bellies and doling out the leftovers, we continued the night at one of the local pubs in Ranelagh (conveniently close to my house!) until we could fit nothing more – food or liquid – into our stomachs and I for one retired uncomfortably satiated with a smile on my face.