Daily Dispatches from Northern Ireland (2025)
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Day Six: Returning, Reflections — and Finally, Rain
LONDONDERRY — We began our sixth and final day together by checking out of the Maldron Hotel, loading our suitcases onto the bus and settling into our seats for the three-hour trip back to Dublin Airport. Our drive through the sprawling outskirts of the city, past the never-ending lush green fields, was the perfect backdrop…
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Day Five: Bridges to Peace in Londonderry
LONDONDERRY — Our fifth and final full day started with a panel on the healing process in Northern Ireland and the connection between trauma, art and reconciliation. The class heard from Archdeacon Robert Miller, actor Michael Doherty and playwright Jonathan Burgess. While we ate pastries and drank coffee and tea at the office of the…
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Day Four: The Road to Londonderry: Physical, Political, Spiritual
LONDONDERRY — When Nobel Prize–winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney traveled from Belfast north to Londonderry on Wednesday, Feb. 2, 1972, the day was bleak and dreary. He wrote in his poem “The Road to Derry” of the “wet wind in the hedges” and “dark cloud on the mountain.” Heaney then described the “flags like black…
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Day Three: Perspectives from Across the Divide: Shared Grief Lingers Decades After the Good Friday Agreement
BELFAST — During our last day in Belfast we met 10 people, all of whom are an integral part of creating and keeping peace in Northern Ireland. We spoke to victims on both sides of the conflict, senior members of paramilitary groups during the Troubles, leaders of ethnic and religious minority groups in Northern Ireland,…
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Day Two: Pilgrimage and Peaks on Saint Patrick’s Day in Northern Ireland
BELFAST — Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! This morning started bright and early as we prepared for our adventure to Slemish Mountain, once St. Patrick’s home and now a popular pilgrimage hike on his namesake holiday. As we left the city, Belfast’s pink double-decker buses and brick buildings gave way to green fields, grazing lambs and crumbling farmhouses.…
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Day One: In Post-Conflict Belfast, the Past Is the Present
BELFAST — At 8:41 a.m., after a six-hour direct flight, our airplane landed in Dublin. Twelve excited students, Dean Melanie Huff and adjunct professor Liz Donovan arrived chock-full of expectations for the journey. Our arrival was smooth until we reached border control, and things started to look bleak. Student Lauren Hartley had lost her passport. …