Students enrolled in Fordham’s Global Outreach program will visit Northern Ireland for the first time this spring.
Thanks to a recent visit from Joseph P. Kennedy III, they’ll have a better idea of what to expect as they explore the region and learn about its past.
“You expect politicians to put a veneer over everything, but he was very honest about the situation on the ground in Northern Ireland,” said Rylan Carroll, a sophomore at the Gabelli School of Business and one of the 11 students who will travel to the region for eight days in March.
To prepare students for the trip, Fordham hosted Kennedy, a former U.S. representative from Massachusetts and U.S. Special Envoy to Northern Ireland for Economic Affairs from 2022 to 2024, at a Jan. 23 luncheon at the Lincoln Center campus.
Exploring a Troubled History
When the Global Outreach students visit Northern Ireland, they’ll spend time in Belfast and Derry and learn about the sectarian strife between Catholics and Protestants that dominated the region for decades, long known as “the Troubles.”
Active hostilities ceased in 1998, but tough questions remain about how a society heals from the trauma of a conflict that lasted nearly four decades and resulted in an estimated 3,500 dead and 47,500 injured. The conversation with Kennedy in January touched on many of those questions.
For instance, Carroll said, Kennedy recounted his conversations with a man whose father had been killed in the conflict. His father’s killer had been freed from prison as part of the peace process, and he still struggled with the notion that the man was walking the streets today.
“We can go on talking about religious pluralism, but there are also … real-world consequences to all of the movements that have happened there,” said Carroll, a global business major with a concentration in marketing.
Carroll signed up for the trip because he’s interested in religious pluralism and because he sees parallels with marketing, which is fundamentally about understanding how people react to messages and make decisions.
“We talked a lot about how people came to decisions to end the Troubles,” he said.
“Like, can you live with the people who have committed these acts against you and be at peace? Can you come from a perspective of wanting your children and their children, and so on and so forth, to be all right?”
John Gownley, director of Global Outreach, credited James Haddad, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill, with proposing Northern Ireland as a destination. Once that was settled, Gownley said, the next step was finding a speaker to join the nine-week formation period during which students discuss race, religion, and other topics relevant to their destination.
Kennedy was an obvious choice, having spoken about Northern Ireland as the speaker at the University’s 179th commencement, where he also received an honorary degree. Gownley said Kennedy is the kind of speaker he hopes to recruit for future Global Outreach trips.
“We’re trying to find opportunities beyond the classroom for students to get real face time with people who work [in the region they’re visiting], whether it’s in government, politics, religion, or social justice movements,” he said.
