Arcadia Ireland

One of the funny things about working in education is that you are constantly looking back and wrapping up. For teachers the start of each school year is the beginning of a whole new life – making roughly the same journey you had made the year before but with a different year group of individuals for company. In the brief time since I joined Arcadia I have realised that is even more true working in international education, where a new group of students arrives not just every year but each academic term.

The term that is drawing to an close now was my first working for Arcadia Ireland, and I have enjoyed every moment of it. There have been many highlights to the semester’s cultural life, and this seemed like an appropriate time to reminisce about some of them.

The term started with Orientations in January. Students arriving in Ireland for the first time got a chance to get to know each other and the Arcadia Ireland staff during a scavenger hunt around Dublin city centre and a meal in one of the capital’s many traditional pubs. We also took our students out for a day of learning hands-on practical skills that might come in useful for really blending in in Ireland. At Howth Castle and Ballyknocken Cookery School in Wicklow they were taught the basics of Irish cookery (all Arcadia Ireland students are well capable now of whipping up a stew or a soup!), before getting to grips with Irish sports during an afternoon learning to play hurling and Gaelic football.

For many of our students, the highlight of the semester has traditionally been the Éalú weekend. Éalú is the Irish word for “escape”, and it is the name given to Arcadia Ireland’s rural getaway every semester. It is a chance for all our students to get away from it all for a few days in a rural setting; it is also a rare opportunity for all Arcadia Ireland staff and students to spend some time together and get to know each other.

This term, all our students joined us in early February at the Falls Hotel in Ennistymon for three days of “craic”. The programme featured an evening of céilí dancing (which was fun for participants of all levels of experience!) and a chance for students to show off their knowledge of all things Irish in the Great Arcadia Ireland Quiz. There was a visit to the towering cliffs of Moher, a brilliant guided coach tour of the history and archaeology of the Burren, and some of our students even took to the surf board to tame the waves of the wild Atlantic!

Éalú is the biggest event we run: the only one with spaces for all of our current students enrolled at Irish universities. Our other field trips are smaller in terms of the number of participants – but they are just as much fun!

For two of these trips we made our way to the extreme north and south of the island of Ireland to admire the natural beauties of the Giant’s Causeway in Co. Antrim (in Northern Ireland) and the Killarney National Park in Co. Kerry, respectively.

Our trip to Northern Ireland took in what are without a doubt the most starkly contrasting of pair of destinations on the Arcadia Ireland calendar. After taking in the astonishing natural scenery of the Giant’s Causeway, the world-famous UNESCO World Heritage site on the Antrim coast where legend has it one giant pursued another across the ocean waves on a causeway made of hexagonal basalt columns, we made our way to Belfast. There we were treated to a guided tour of localities in the city connected with the Northern Ireland “Troubles”, that violent sectarian conflict between loyalist Protestants and republican Catholics that tore Northern Irish society apart for over three decades between the 1960s and the 1990s. Our guide was a highly knowledgeable lecturer from Queen’s University: his account of the Troubles left a lump in the throat, and a deeper, more nuanced understanding of Northern Irish society in our minds.

Our trip to the Killarney National Park in early April could not have been more different to that drive around the urban sites of Belfast. Students were incredibly lucky with the weather as they took to the waters of Lough Leane in two small boats. Our destination? A small island home to the ruins of a 7^th-century monastery. After picnicking on the island, we made our way to the nearby Torc waterfall (which takes its name from the Irish word for a wild boar) and hiked from there to nearby Muckross House.

Between those two excursions to the beauties of the Irish countryside, north and south, some of our students joined Arcadia’s regional trip to London, where we met up with Arcadia students spending the semester at universities in England and Scotland. Our hosts at Arcadia England put together a great programme – the highlights of which were a visit to Hampton Court palace (once the home of English kings like Henry VIII and William III) and to a performance of Wicked in a real-life West End Theatre. In their spare time, our students crammed in a whole host of other visits to sites as various as the Prime Minister’s Home in Downing Street, the statue dedicated to Paddington bear in Paddington Station, the National Gallery and the British Museum.

In addition to those excursions we have also done things in and around our Dublin offices on Fishamble Street. A talk about the importance of LinkedIn as a tool after study-abroad, a trip around the charity shops of Dublin to source fun and sustainable St Patrick’s Day costumes, a walking tour of Dublin city centre to mark International Women’s Day, and a morning drop-in breakfast to mark Pancake Tuesday were all memorable in their own right.

All that remains on the social calendar for this term are the farewell meals with our students in our partner-universities around Ireland. Gráinne and Robert met with our outgoing students from the Irish Parliament internship programme last week and had a lovely morning, and yesterday Gráinne was in Galway for a final catch-up with our students at the University of Galway and the Burren College of Art. The three of us will be travelling around Ireland to see off all our other students over the course of the next couple of weeks.

After that, the cycle will soon start again for another term.

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The term that is coming to an end now has been my first working for Arcadia, and I have a feeling that even if I end up doing many of the same things again with different students, the group that will be leaving us at the end of this term will always be the original, and therefore the norm, the yardstick against whom all future comers will be measured. If they are half as much fun as the current bunch, I can’t wait to meet them!