COSMO POLITIQUE

IDDAY 1 quick notes:

Kingsley Aikins, Founder of Diaspora Matters:

Be Irish dress British think Yiddish

Oislin Quinn, Lord Mayor of Dublin

200’000 pax not Irish but Dubliners
City built by foreigners (Vikings)
You’ve got to make people feel ownership of any project you have as a Mayor.

Ciaran Cannon, Minister of State/Education

2013 Gathering year
Connection has been made more affordable through the ICTs

Provost Patrick Prendergast, Trinity College
Tg Lurgen Avicii view YouTube Watch this song performed in Irish by students
Large interconnected global citizens communityHalf of the faculty and 1/5 th of its students come from abroad
The most innovative ideas emerge at the interface between disciplined
Global connectivity
1st university to establish Professorship in French and German, in Arabic and Hindustani
Academic teaching partnership and new programs (creative entrepreneurship )

Partnership between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born (Burke)

And as this was also Dublin Culture Night , I was lucky enough to join the very last group entering the Archbishop Marsh’s library.

Extraordinary visit at sunset on Culture night by the Keeper, Dr Jason McElligott of the oldest and most wonderfully preserved library in Dublin, making this city which also hosts the exquisite Chester Beatty Library, one of the world’s Mecca for bookworms such as myself !

I’ll elaborate later but share my notes in the very likely case I’m too busy next week:

Conservation is excellent as the weather, up to the recent climate change, was perfect for books in Dublin in this library which doesn’t have any kind of heating!

Due to thefts as of the 19th century, visitors were locked while reading these books!

Contrary to books produced later on and using chemicals, the preserved state of these 300 and more year old books is outstanding and their only problem is the binding which gets worn out after too many opening and closing !

This isn’t an Irish lubrary but a universal one as the archbishop was fascinated by other civilizations and a fluent Hebrew speaker… Amongst many more languages.
What interested him was how non Christian civilization such as the
Japanese and Chinese could precisely be civilized yet non Christian.
He was in a way seeking a common denominator between unique God believers as a was to “boil down” the divine essence.
During the Irish independence, this essentially Anglican and Huguenot heritage was almost destroyed as a symbol of the British presence.

It owes it totally preserved state (you are in the exact situation of the early 18th century reader!) to the neglect by all authorities till the 1950s. Otherwise like so many old places in Ireland it might have been damaged!) look at this extraordinary staircase in particular.

This was the delightful concert of Moya Brennan and Cormac de Bharra at the Dublin Castle for the Interdependence Day 2013. Further to my amateur video, here’s a wonderful but much more professional rendering: