Arcadia Ireland

Each academic term Arcadia Ireland run a number of co-curricular trips to places around Ireland. So far this term we have taken students to the Burren in Co. Clare and to the Aran Islands, as well as running a couple of pop-up events from our base in Dublin.

Last weekend saw our daytrip to the Giant’s Causeway and Belfast city. This trip is unique among our co-curricular offerings as it is the only one that takes us across the border to Northern Ireland.

The trip is very much a tale of two halves in a number of respects – one ancient, one modern; one dedicated to a wonder of the natural world, the other focused on recent history, society and politics.

Our morning programme took us by coach from rainy Dublin to the glorious vista of the Giant’s Causeway in north County Antrim, where the sun was just cautiously beginning to peep out from behind the clouds by the time we arrived. This iconic rock formation, formed by volcanic activity 60 million years ago, is a UNESCO world heritage site, and it is easy to see why. About 40,000 basalt columns rise from the ocean. Most of them are perfectly hexagonal in shape, and because of this geometrical precision they give the impression of something crafted by human hands. This impression gave rise to a potent origins myth that survives in the popular imagination long after nineteenth- and twentieth-century geologists proffered a scientific explanation. The emergency of myths and folk stories that explain specific geographical features is not uncommon in primitive cultures around the world, and pre-historic Ireland was no exception.

The story about the origins of the Giant’s Causeway revolves around Finn McCool, one of the heroes of the so-called Fenian cycle. (The oldest surviving written versions are in manuscripts dated between the 8^th and the 12^th century, but the stories contained in those texts would have been handed down in an oral tradition for hundreds of years before that.)

According to the story, an Irish giant called Finn McCool (who is not a giant in any of the other stories about him) had been engaged in a feud with Scottish giant called Benandonner. After trading insults across the Irish sea for a while, Finn decided to build a causeway across the sea so he could fight his Scottish rival. (This, in the story, accounts for the way the hexagonal basalt rocks have the appearance of a stone road or floor made by human hands, but on a much larger and heavier scale.) When his causeway is completed he walks across, only to discover that the other giant is twice as large as he is. Luckily, Benandonner hasn’t spotted him yet to realise his size advantage, so Finn runs home. The Scottish giant follows him. When the Scottish giant arrives at Finn’s house, his wife comes up with a plan: she tells Finn to get in an oversized baby’s cot. Benandonner is welcomed by Finn’s wife, who tells him that her husband has gone out and she is home by herself with their baby. The giant takes one look at Finn in the cot and thinks “If that is the size of the baby, then his father must be enormous.” Scared by the prospect of an even bigger and mightier giant, it is now Benandonner’s turn to run away. And as he flees across the causeway he smashes it behind him so that Finn McCool cannot follow him. This story explained why there is a rock formation that looks like the start of an abandoned causeway that would once upon a time have led across the water.

I reminded our students of the legend of Finn McCool and the origins of the Giant’s Causeway on the bus on our way to Northern Ireland in the morning, and as I walked around the site I heard it repeated many times by the tourists who had travelled there from many different parts of Ireland, the UK and other parts of the world. Hearing the story of Finn McCool and his rival from across the Irish Sea repeated in different accents illustrated the enduring nature of such folk tales even in an age where scientific knowledge has long overtaken the primal human need for explaining the shape of the world around them through folk tales.

Climbing onto the main causeway, it is clear why the story tells of a giant. It is difficult to get a sense of the scale of these basalt hexagons from photographs. Only when you are faced with clambering across them does it become apparent how large they really are.

And it is not just the scale of the rocks or the structure they form that made me think. There is something about being by the ocean, about hearing the sound of waves crashing on rocks and sand, that can make one pensive or reflective. Perhaps it has something to do with the timing of this co-curricular trip around the mid-term break in November, but I noticed I was not alone in experiencing such a reaction to the place. A few of our students, too, broke off from the group in solitary reflection – something that is all too rare in our noisy, busy lives.

We spent about an hour and a half wandering around the stones of the Giant’s Causeway. Considering the time of year, that was probably the right amount of time to be out in the open on the exposed north-Antrim coastline. Because while we were extremely lucky with the weather, fingers were starting to get numb by the time we got back on the bus.

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Our next stop was Belfast. Our programme there could not be more starkly contrasted with the serenity of a morning spent on an ancient rock formation steeped in Celtic myth and legend.

As I said at the start of this piece, this is the only one of our Arcadia trips that crosses the border between the Republic of Ireland in the south and the state of Northern Ireland. The history of Northern Ireland is a complex and much contested one. Yet there is no checkpoint at the border, no customs officials wearing the uniforms of two distinct nations asking to see passports. An observant traveller may notice that the signposts along the motorway suddenly change colour, and that distances and speed limits are no longer in kilometres but in miles. Depending on the mood of governments on either side of the border and the relative state of the two local economies, you may even notice a change in the quality of the road surface. I doubt, therefore, whether many of our students would have realised last Saturday morning as we made our way north from Dublin that they had crossed a national border until long after the fact. Some possibly only knew for sure once our coach pulled up outside Queen’s University Belfast, where we could stretch our legs and buy our morning coffees … using a different currency from the one in use in the Republic where we had woken up that morning.

Despite the ease of the border crossing, the division that runs along the northern part of the island of Ireland is not negligible. The state of Northern Ireland may only have been formed just over a hundred years ago, at the time when Ireland gained its independence in 1922, but the six counties that were partitioned off from the rest of Ireland in that controversial historic moment had been culturally distinct for centuries before that. Northern Ireland remains something of an enigma to inhabitants of the southern Republic, who may know its history (at least in broad outline), yet cannot help but feel unsettled, uncomfortable and displaced when they visit Belfast, Derry, Enniskillen or Armagh.

As we left Queens on our way to the Giant’s Causeway that morning, I gave the students a very concise overview of the history of Northern Ireland, emphasising the fact that the culture and history of that place is both distinct from and intricately linked with those of both Britain and Ireland. That version of events was obviously selective, as it would be impossible to address every connection, contradiction and nuance of the history of any territory, let alone one as contested as Northern Ireland, but we felt it would be useful to give our students a sense of the forces that had gone into the shaping of the place we were visiting. This was especially relevant because we would spend the afternoon on a historical tour of the Belfast focused on the history of the Northern Ireland “Troubles”, the euphemistically named violent conflict between Protestants and Catholics that erupted in the late 1960s and claimed thousands of lives over the next three decades.

Our guide for the afternoon was Dominic Bryan, an English-born anthropologist at Queen’s University Belfast who has been living and working in the city since the early 1980s. Dominic boarded our coach at Queen’s (but not before we posed for a group picture outside the beautiful nineteenth-century redbrick Lanyon Building), and took us on a tour of some of the main sites associated with the Troubles. This was a great way for our students to learn about the conflict that defined the world’s picture of Ireland throughout most of the second part of the twentieth century. Rather than learn about it in the detachment of the classroom, we were taken around to see the murals depicting both nationalist and unionist iconography that adorn the gable ends of many houses in working-class areas around Belfast, the memorials to the various groups of victims (both civilian and paramilitary) that have popped up in the open spaces between buildings after the 1998 peace agreement, and the barriers dividing Protestant and Catholic housing estates that remain in place until this day.

The core idea running through Dominic’s narrative of the history of all these places is that the Northern Ireland conflict is not really about religion. (We sometimes joke that Northern Ireland must be the only place in the western world in our secularised age where you must distinguish between Protestant atheists and Catholic atheists.) Instead, it is fundamentally a tribal conflict, in which different population groups have pitted themselves in animosity against one another. But his account is not a bleak one, as it also emphasises the astonishing success of the peace process. Despite the recent political impasse in the power-sharing structure that governs the region, there have been no renewed outbreaks of sectarian violence.

Dominic, as always, was extremely generous with his time and expertise, and we concluded our day outside Belfast City Hall where he answered many questions from our students – on topics ranging from the reasons behind the amount of Palestinian flags flying in Belfast to the implications of Brexit on the Peace process and the possibility of a united Ireland. On previous iterations of this trip I have been very impressed with the feedback from our students. (More than one student on our Arcadia programmes in Ireland has in the past expressed an unease with the way in which the Troubles areas in Belfast and Derry are marketed as a tourist destination. I share that misgiving, and feel there is something voyeuristic about going around Belfast in a bus taking photographs of places where people’s real lives are taking place. But seeing how at least some of the students participating share this critical awareness makes the unease worth it.) The level of critical engagement on show on a late Saturday afternoon in Belfast last weekend confirmed to me that the narrative of Northern Ireland can really speak to the type of U.S. university students our programmes are aimed at.

The only regret we feel about this trip to Northern Ireland is that it always feels like it is over too quickly. We would really love some more time to explore the ideas suggested by Dominic’s thought-provoking tour in more detail – especially since it turns out that some of the students who study abroad with us are invested in learning more about this area of Irish history.

American interest in the conflict in Northern Ireland is not a new phenomenon. Famously, U.S. President Bill Clinton played a major part in negotiating the peace agreement between the opposing sides in 1998. More recently, the current holder of the same office has emphasised the importance of maintaining the peace brokered a quarter of a century ago in the aftermath of Brexit.

In order to give our students more time to explore the history of Northern Ireland in greater depth, we are really excited to extend this existing co-curricular event into an overnight trip in the Spring term of 2024. In addition to students having a bit more time to engage with Dominic’s guided tour of Belfast, and perhaps to explore the city by themselves, we shall also be travelling to Derry/Londonderry, where we will take in historic sites like the city walls and the Guild Hall as well as the Free Derry Museum which chronicles the history of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement, the Bloody Sunday massacre, and the Troubles. There should even be time to visit the Derry Girls mural – dedicated to a successful recent television sitcom which is set during the Troubles.

This extended trip to Northern Ireland is part of Arcadia’s commitment to providing opportunities for learning about the Troubles and the Peace process in that part of Ireland.

One of the programmes currently offered by Arcadia Abroad is a collaboration with Augsburg University on “Conflict, Peace and Transition in Northern Ireland”, which combines a classroom element with an opportunity for students to complete an internship placement at a variety of community and cultural institutions across the city.

When we visit Derry/Londonderry in the Spring we are of course hoping to link up with our partners from Augsburg to give our current students a flavour of the kind of work they do in the community.

We can’t wait!