ireland
Ireland has placed storytelling at the heart of its public diplomacy strategy.
Over 30 events are planned across the Derry City and Strabane District as part of this year’s Community Relations and Culture Awareness Week between 18th and 24th September. The aim of the Northern Ireland wide initiative is to engage with the public and urge them to consider and embrace the growing cultural diversity that exists in our local community.
The Irish Aid Secretary General, Niall Burgess, arrived in Uganda for a five day visit. [...] According to Daniel Cronin, the Irish Ambassador to Uganda, Ireland has invested over 500 million Euros in Uganda since the embassy was opened in 1994.
Native American Choctaw leaders have arrived in Ireland to unveil a sculpture celebrating the financial contribution made by the tribe to starving Irish people in 1847. At the height of Ireland's Great Famine, Choctaws in southern states of the USA sent a donation of $170 (£111). [...] A million people died in Ireland and another two million left the country when the potato crop failed for successive years, removing a vegetable that poor people ate every day. [...] The Choctaw people empathized with Ireland's famine victims.
Ireland has announced €6 million in humanitarian aid to Iraq and Yemen which are currently raged by fierce wars which has resulted in a large-scale displacement of civilians. From the fund, €2m is being given to the Iraq Humanitarian Pooled Fund in response to the needs of almost 11 million Iraqi people affected by the violence linked to Islamic State (IS), and the counter-insurgency operation launched by the Iraqi government, Irish media reported.
According to a UNESCO report in 2012, South Africa, the US, and Canada are among the most popular destinations for Nigerian students. But they are dwarfed in popularity by the UK with nearly 18,000 Nigerian students annually. The cultural and educational exchange organisation, the British Council, estimated that Nigerians would become the second biggest cohort of foreign students in the UK after Chinese in the coming years, with one MP estimating the number will reach 30,000. That was before the Brexit vote.
Ireland must engage in a deeper way with its diaspora in order to prosper in a world of increasing uncertainty, Tim O’Connor, a former senior Irish diplomat, told a gathering of Irish-Americans in Dublin on Tuesday evening. Ahead of Donald Trump’s presidency in the US and the UK’s forthcoming departure from the EU, he said that now was not a moment to be thinking small.