10th Anniversary of The Good Friday Agreement

On Thursday of last week, our politics professor Michael Anderson, who is  a PhD candidate at University of the City of Dublin (UCD) managed to get the fifteen of us into a forum called "From Conflict to Consensus: The Legacy of the Good Friday Agreement." (here's a link to the program-  http://www.ucd.ie/spire/text%20files/ibis_conference.pdf)  Everyone in the crowd was an academic of some sort, and I chatted with a man next to me that was from the Dutch Embassy.  The forum lasted all day, and the shining moment was when the recently resigned Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland, Bertie Ahern spoke! He arrived with an entourage of media, assistants, and surprisingly, very few body guards.  He recent resignation was somewhat anticipated by the public.  My host mom and I were discussing his time in office and she said, "He's done a lot for the peace keeping, but he just needs to go before we find something else in his bank account!" He recently failed to claim several thousands of Sterling so the already skeptical public was not surprised to see him go.  Regardless of his personal life, Ahern gave a fantastic and professional speech about the Good Friday Agreement and what to view for the future.  Several other distinguished people lectured, one woman who is the author of one of our staple textbooks, and also the Secretary of State of Northern Ireland.  The entire experience was just absolutely amazing. The day got better when that night my friend Summer and I realized we made it on the late night news with some footage of Bertie! (That's what happens when you sit in the second row...) Another guy in our group made it into the papers the following day.  The most wonderful part of the forum was that I wasn't completely lost during the lectures. As in, I've learned enough here to understand what people are talking about concerning the peace process, the Conflict, etc. I still don't understand all of the Irish humor though. Anyway, we finished up this week with our ISP proposals and lots of papers.  I'm traveling to Belfast for three weeks to research sexual education in Northern Ireland.  Bill Rolston, professor of Sociology at the University of Ulster has agreed to be my advisor over the next three weeks.  He's done a lot of research on the political murals in Northern, but has also published research on sexual attitudes and behaviors of young people in Northern Ireland.  He's a great resource and I'm so thankful to have gotten in contact with him.  As for the pictures below of our last weekend, the rather large man in the picture with me is named Collie. He's a friend of some of our Dublin friends, and when we first met, I couldn't understand him so I asked him to spell his name. He said, "Oh, okay. You spell it L-E-G-E-N-D." So from then on we've referred to him as "The Legend!" HAHA!