Education
Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire. (William Butler Yeats) © Willeke Van Eeckhoutte and Ireland, Multiple Sclerosis & Me, 2011-2012. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Willeke Van Eeckhoutte and Ireland, Multiple Sclerosis & Me with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Ireland, a love story
“You will be back in 3 months time” my dad said. “Ireland is a third world country.” He was a truck driver in the 1980s, delivering goods to Ireland when the country was in recession and likened the country to one that was in chaos and in serious economic trouble. Understandably he thought that as a Belgian girl, I would miss certain things that come for granted in a rich, industrialized country. The Ireland of 2002 was not a third world country anymore, in fact it never was. In 2002, the country’s economy was booming and tenderly called the ‘Celtic Tiger.’ For a while, it had the lowest unemployment in Europe, but when it fell into recession in 2008, we suddenly became the country with the highest number in unemployed people. From…
Irish character, Edna O’Brien
“When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.” (Edna O’Brien) © Willeke Van Eeckhoutte and Ireland, Multiple Sclerosis & Me, 2011-2012.
Your feet will bring you to where your heart is
Your feet will bring you where your heart is (Irish proverb) © Willeke Van Eeckhoutte and Ireland, Multiple Sclerosis & Me, 2011-2012. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Willeke Van Eeckhoutte and Ireland, Multiple Sclerosis & Me with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
W.B. Yeats, the collected poems
“You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace; think where man’s glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.” (William Butler Yeats) © Willeke Van Eeckhoutte and Ireland, Multiple Sclerosis & Me, 2011-2012.
Old Library, Trinity College
© Willeke Van Eeckhoutte and Ireland, Multiple Sclerosis & Me, 2011-2012. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Willeke Van Eeckhoutte and Ireland, Multiple Sclerosis & Me with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
The stalker called MS
In my job I often had to do “root cause analysis” assessments on what went wrong with a certain account and how we could “cure” it again. I miss the term “root cause analysis” and I thought I’d do a one on myself, or my life. What the heck, it’s not like I have anything better to do on another dreary summer’s day in Ireland! I suspect that my illness, the incredibly annoying stalker called Multiple Sclerosis, entered my system through a back door in the 1990s. I have to go back when I worked in a library and I was having the time of my life, so it couldn’t have come at a worse time. I had a period of extreme fatigue and it turned out to be glandular fever…