On my third day in Ireland I attended an academic lecture by Professor Roderick Flynn of Dublin City University, and I went to the National Print Museum of Dublin.
Professor Flynn’s lecture was very enlightening and gave me a deeper insight into Irish history and the media landscape of Ireland.
The history of Ireland is very interesting to me, mostly due to the ambiguous identity of it’s people. Ireland has gone through many major invasions in it’s long history. These invasions including the Vikings, and Anglo-Normans, and the Celtics to name a few. This, combined with the epoch-making diaspora of the Irish people that occurred after the great Irish famine in the 1800’s, makes being “Irish” a difficult thing to define. One thing I remember distinctly from the lecture is that Professor Flynn described Ireland as a nation of “coming and going”. This is a simple but accurate definition of the Irish people. Many groups and creeds have come to Ireland to either invade or colonize, either way those people assimilated with the Irish identity. Further more, Ireland has an infamous reputation for wide spread immigration. The population of Ireland is estimated to be around six million people, but around the world eighty million people have a degree of Irish descent cumulatively. I find the subject of Irish history and Irish Identity to be very intriguing, and that interest has only grown after visiting Ireland and learning more about it’s people.
Professor Flynn continued to elaborate on Irish history until reaching his main discussion point, Irish media. He described the intimate but convoluted relationship between newspapers and politics. How each newspaper had a political identity attributed to it, by either being affiliated with a specific political party, or simply identifying as either a home rule or unionist organization. Home rule meaning they envision a free and independent Ireland, and unionist meaning the organization strives for Ireland to remain part of the British Empire. He continued talking us through the centuries of media from newspapers, to radio, to modern television programing.
After the lecture we went to the National Print Museum of Dublin. I enjoyed this excursion. We got to see the first operational printing presses and a plethora of old apparatuses implemented in Irish printing facilities in the last century. It actually made me very happy to see these old machines still being used even after the world declared them obsolete. My favorite part was learning the printing vernacular that had spread from the industry to every day conversations. For instance, did you know the expression “to coin a phrase”, comes from the printing industry?
All in all, it was very educational and joyful day. I am beginning to see how traveling is both a life changing and mind changing experience.