Reflection and Thoughts (Mairead)

In class this week we were introduced to the rural community of Carrigtwohill. We watched informative videos created by people from the area promoting the town of Carrigtwohill, and learned a lot about it's developments in the past decade or so. We began a problem solving process within our groups by attempting to empathise with the people of this area by looking inwards and sharing our own personal experiences with various communities throughout our lives. This helped us to begin thinking about what kind of topics we want to address with our final project, a socially engaging piece of digital media for the people of Carrigtwohill. 

The social dynamics of Carrigtwohill seem similar to other rural towns found around Ireland- a profound population of people aged 50+, working families and children. One thing that stood out to me though was the recent influx of ethnicities from outside of Ireland into the area. After some discussion with my group members we decided we want to look further into the community of non-Irish people in the area. We want to find out the experiences of these individuals who moved into the community, if they found it welcoming, or if they ever found any hardship while settling into their life in rural Ireland. We also want to interview Irish members of the community to see what they do to make sure non-Irish individuals moving into the community feel welcome.

We formulated some questions we might ask non-Irish folks and came up with the following: 

-Do you feel welcome and accepted in the community of Carrigtwohill? 

-Do you think the community of Carrigtwohill is generally accepting of non-Irish folks living in the area? 

-Can you give examples of times when you felt a part of the community? 

-Have you ever felt out of place in your community? 

-(if yes)What has made you feel unaccepted or out of place? 

-Is there anything you can think of that might help others like you to settle in comfortably to your community? 

-What are some differences between Carrigtwohill and your home town? 

-What are some similarities? 

Here are some questions we might ask the Irish folks of the area: 

-Do you think the community of Carrigtwohill is generally accepting of non-Irish folks living in the area? 

-Can you think of examples of times where the community has made extra effort to welcome people of different ethnicities to the area? 

-Is there anything you would do differently in regards to the community of Carrigtwohill?