For the second year running I had the pleasure of attending the Cork Lifelong Learning Festival. Because of a previous appointment, I had missed the UNESCO Growing Learning in Cork event and had only the Thursday and the Friday to enjoy the proceedings, being picked up at the airport on a wet and miserable Wednesday night by Willie McAuliffe (Chair of the Festival Organising Committee) after a 14 hour journey. But a bright and sunny Thursday morning quickly dissipated the fatigue. As before, the festival was a carnival of learning excellence. Attendance at the events was up and it seems that the citizens of Cork are responding in large numbers to the multiplicity of learning opportunities presented to them.

I was driven by Tina Neylon to Willie’s Knocknaheeny Community School where a celebration of creative cake-making heralded the opening of the school’s new home economics facility. Here there was culinary invention in all shapes and sizes, - ships, ballerinas, castles, eggs and more – young creativity at its best. The event was opened by Pat O’Connell, the man from Cork’s English Market who famously made the Queen laugh during her visit in 2012, and was attended by photographers from the local press. It was gratifying to see young talent making news in this way. There should be more of this. 

The next stop was in the Youth Centre in Hollyhill Shopping Centre opposite the school where, while we were there, a group of severely handicapped young people made music for a wildly enthusiastic audience. Some of these youngsters could do no more than shake a tambourine or bang a drum, but there was also a young member of the group with an excellent voice who sang, and sang beautifully. The whole came together with excellent precision and one could but admire the patience and dedication of the group leader, Mary Keating, to make it so.

Then it was back to the school for an exhibition of dancing by the students of Colaiste Stiofain Naofa (Further Education College).  They danced to a variety of musical genres from jazz to pop to classical ballet. Once again the standard was very high, particularly a young male-female duet who combined grace with technical and emotional proficiency far beyond their years. They should go far in the future. 

We found the time to call in at QDS Centre in Togher where, among others, troupes of not quite so severely handicapped young and older performers with the capacity to overcome their difficulties in dance and music, and coached by dedicated teachers with which Cork seems to be so blessed, had been participating in the festival.

After a quick lunch we drove to the Togher/Ballyphehane Community Development Project in one of the two Cork’s ‘learning neighbourhoods’ announced at the EcCoWell UNESCO Seminar. These learning neighbourhoods are another local initiative to vitalize communities with multiple problems.  Here I spoke with Siobhán O’Dowd, a vastly experienced community worker who has done wonders to satisfy the many needs of such deprived neighbourhoods and now looks to lifelong learning as a means to improve the peoples’ lot.

The evening was different.  After a gourmandise dinner at the city’s five star hotel Hayfield Manor as the guest of Seamus O’Tuama of Adult and Continuing Education at UCC, Tina and the others took me to the Church of St Finbarr known as the Honan Chapel, a marvellously decorative building in the university grounds. Here before a packed audience a finely harmonious male voice choir (Cór Cúil Aodha) sang songs in Ireland’s own language. The singing was impeccable, the ambiance was magical, the acoustics were perfect. 

The following morning, Friday, we met at Cork Institute of Technology, where I discussed the UNESCO Global Learning Cities network with the Cork Learning City Steering Group, particularly in relation to the key features. I went through the eight principles on which they had been formulated  (shown below) and indicated that the implementation of the features offers some flexibility of interpretation. 

Friday afternoon saw me with a veritable cornucopia of choices, a precious luxury offered to every citizen for every part of the week. I chose to attend Alliance Francaise for a presentation on Venice delivered enthusiastically by a young Venetian lady who was justly proud of her serenissiman heritage. Not surprisingly many other citizens of Cork joined me in that lecture, as they had done throughout the week at other venues.

It remained only to spend the Friday evening in the Spalpin Fanach pub for Scribes – one of the festival’s events inspired by its partnership with Feile an Phobail in Belfast - and to listen to exquisite poetry and prose over several glasses of the city’s best Beamish. I was even persuaded to make a contribution from my own book  ‘The Conflent Tales’ though that didn’t match the intensity of Danny Morrison’s chapter on the Troubles from his novel West Belfast, Leanne O’Sullivan’s beautiful poetry, Martina Devlin’s reading from her ghost story The House Where It Happened, inspired by Ireland’s only mass witchcraft trial, and Conal Creedon’s hilarious stories local to Cork.  Once more I was indebted to Tina Neylon, who not only acted as my chauffeur for the two days I spent in this wonderful city, but was also responsible for organizing the whole week of festivities, with of course the help of Denis Barrett, Willie and the whole Festival Committee. 

The Cork Festival of Lifelong Learning is a special event. While it may only last a single week, its legacy remains throughout the year. Those who have come to learning in this way tend to stay with it for a lifetime, which is how it should be. I have a feeling that, next year, it will be even more attractive and Cork will continue its journey as an LCN EcCoWell and UNESCO learning city.

 P. S. The 8 underpinnings for the development of the learning city key features were (modified):

1. The extent to which the city empowers its citizens to help create its future
2. The extent to which the city engages its institutional stakeholders – businesses, higher and further education, schools, the local authority itself etc – in separately and jointly contributing to economic, social, cultural and environmental development
3. The extent to which individuals and communities contribute to the welfare of everyone in the city through social inclusion strategies and active citizenship
4. The extent to which the city builds an outward-looking culture of lifelong learning in the majority of its citizens and interacts with other cities throughout Ireland and the world. 
5. The extent to which the city embraces innovation and creativity in dealing with its economic, environmental and social issues - and helps create and harness the skills, values and attributes needed to foster them 
6. The extent to which the city has a strategy to maximise the potential of all its geographical, historical, financial, human, intellectual and natural resources
7. The extent to which the city uses every communication technique to broadcast its vision and its high values to its citizens, its organisations and the wider world in order to create civic esteem, shared energy and inward investment
8. The frequency with which the city monitors and measures itself against a wide range of learning city indices in order to maintain the high quality of its progress.

Each one of course expands into several indicators and there are helpful learning materials on how much of it can be done at http://eurolocal.info.

Norman Longworth