Galway’s diverse voices celebrated through poetry to mark World Refugee Day
In the lead-up to World Refugee Day on June 20 the Galway County Council Integration Team hosted a series of international poetry readings on social media, celebrating diverse voices connected to the city.
The project titled Poetry of Place featured daily poetry posts on Instagram, each shared at noon from June 3-20. The series highlighted people from around the world with a meaningful connection to Galway, offering reflections on homelands, identity, and belonging.
Each poem was told in the orator’s native tongue with languages like Ukrainian, Edo, Dari, Irish, and Persian and more.
Integration Team Coordinator, Jennie Swannock said: “The themes explored in the Poetry of Place poems – peace, conflict, resilience, compassion, home, belonging – speak of the refugee experience but also of the shared human experience. Even if we don’t understand the words we can connect to the experience.
“The theme of World Refugee Day this year is ‘Community as Superpower’ – Communities can bring people together.”
Celebrated Galway poet Louis de Paor contributed a reading of an Armenian poem loosely translated into Irish, while Elaine Feeney presented a Palestinian poem in English.
Louis de Paor chose a poem by Moushegh Ishkan. Ishkan spent most of his youth homeless as an orphan and found that the true ‘home’ for him was his language. De Paor, among others, relates to this.
“We all feel when we are in another country that we are perceived as foreign, as alien” he says. “When you watch these videos, you see the contributors are at ease when speaking their own language.”
“This project was an opportunity to say that those shutting doors, burning houses, dismantling tents, do not represent us.
“Ireland has opportunity to be something, to stand for something.”
Their contributions were part of a wider effort to support and celebrate refugees and the refugee experience.
World Refugee Day falls on June 20 every year in honour of refugees fleeing their home country to escape conflict and persecution. The first celebration of the day was in 2001 on the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention where the definition of a refugee was solidified outlining their rights and legal obligations.