Delegation to Ireland from 1st to 7th November 2015
Ireland, on Wikipedia, you will find the following:
Ireland is an island in the North Atlantic separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel, the Irish Sea, and St George’s Channel. It is the second-largest island of the British Isles, trailing only Great Britain, the third-largest in Europe, and the twentieth-largest on Earth.
Politically, Ireland is divided between the Republic of Ireland (officially also named Ireland), which covers five-sixths of the island, and Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom, which covers the remaining area and is located in the northeast of the island. In 2011 the population of Ireland was about 6.4 million, ranking it the second-most populous island in Europe after Great Britain. Just under 4.6 million live in the Republic of Ireland and just over 1.8 million live in Northern Ireland.
The culture of the island has also many features shared with Great Britain, including the English language, and sports such as association football, rugby, horse racing, and golf.
When being invited to join a delegation to Ireland to visit high schools, technical institutes and universities, I was not without query what the country was like (as I have heard of bomb attack by Northern Ireland which is perceived to be politically disturbed, if not unstable). During the week of visit from 1st to 7th November 2016, which gave in fact only 4 main days of stay excluding the time lag and travel time, I was fascinated by the stunning architectures of the universities there, similar in style to the university college buildings of Oxford dating back to the 13th C which I attended a conference in March 2013. I could see traces of the following descriptions of the Oxford buildings in University of Dublin, Trinity College (the oldest in Ireland), Maynooth University (which seated a Chapel with stained-glass windows and mingling of old and new buildings), University College Cork (with a large inner lawn taking close resemblance to Oriel College, Oxford):
*Colleges often signal their most important spaces, such as chapels, dining halls and libraries, through their windows, and may use stained glass. The architects picked up on that tradition by creating a very grand window which shows it’s one of the principal spaces of the college.”
*Inside, the architects created a sequence of spaces that flow and alternate from intimate cocoon-like areas to more open areas with large suspended bay windows offering views onto the garden and the older parts of the college.
*With hectares of land, a park, carefully maintained flowerbeds and a romantic riverside walk, colleges tend to present a fortress-like facade to the outside world.
*Architecture reflects an organization’s ethos.
Why do parents need to spend more when universities in Ireland are using English in lectures, offering strong academic programmes (University of Dublin, Trinity College ranking top 50 in the world with excellent medical courses) and demanding lower tuition fee, and when Ireland is where students are allowed to work part-time during undergraduate years and stay a year after graduation for job opportunities?
Kuby CHAN
Principal
Munsang College
