Ireland Opens Door for Koreans
Four hundred students from each country will be able to work, travel and study under the Korea-Ireland workingholiday program.
By Kim Se-jeong
Staff Reporter
Korea and Ireland have launched the working holiday program last week.
Irish Ambassador Eamonn McKee said the official announcement will be made on St. Patrick's Day, an Irish holiday, Wednesday by incumbent Education and Science Minister Batt O'Keeffe, who will be in Seoul.
This will make Ireland Korea's seventh working-holiday program partner after Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada, France and Germany.
The program, which went into effect on March. 9, allows students between 18 and 30 years old to work, travel and study in each respective country.
Four hundred students from each country will be granted a visa for one year.
Under the program, the ambassador anticipates that the number of Korean students to go to Ireland for English education will increase.
"We have a new strategy emerging, called 'Education Ireland,'" the ambassador said in an interview with The Korea Times last week at his office in Seoul.
It promotes Ireland as a destination for English-language learners.
"I think there's a huge potential to improve increase cooperation between Korea and Ireland on education," for Ireland is relatively unknown among Koreans as a place for learning English.
Likewise, the number of Irish people teaching English in Korea is also low compared to other English-speaking countries.
The number of Korean students going to Ireland totals only a couple of hundred. The number of Irish people living in Korea as English teachers is only 300.
The education minister will be one of 23 St. Patrick's Day envoys that the Irish government dispatches around the world to celebrate Ireland's biggest holiday, McKee said.
In the United States, where a large Irish population settled in the beginning of the 20th century, St. Patrick's Day is much more prominent than it is here.
"This year, our Prime Minister Brian Cowen will visit the White House, and give President Obama a bowl of fresh Irish shamrock," he said.
The leaders will make small speeches, and then walk to Capitol Hill for a luncheon, one of the two occasions when the U.S. President walks to Capitol Hill on an official call.
"We are proud of it," the ambassador said of the occasion.
In Korea, the tradition is rather simple. The Irish Embassy celebrates it with a hotel reception for dignitaries.
On Saturday, a private Patrick's Day parade will take place at Cheonggye Stream in Seoul.
Ambassador McKee is an expert on the Northern Ireland conflict, having spent most of his career involved in the negotiating and peace-building process.
The tension between Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists over the constitution status of Northern Ireland came to an end in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement, ending the 30-year tension.
What he did afterwards was to set up the Conflict Resolution Unit aiming at extracting lessons from the conflict and disseminating them to other areas of conflict.
One of the focuses was how to get women involved in leadership of the country and the peace-making process.
"We had a women's party at the negotiating table," he said.
The envoy, who is a strong advocate for women's political involvement, saw what women could bring to the negotiating table in resolving a conflict during the Northern Ireland peace-building process.
"Women tend to be more inclusive. Men in negotiations tend to be more competitive.
"If you have women involved in the process, they tend to say 'Let's not leave anybody behind. Let's get all the issues on the table,'" Mckee said.
"So the agreement becomes comprehensive."
He suggested the six-party talks could benefit from by having female negotiators.
"Their (women's) presence alters in a very positive way the dynamics of the engagement and their presence alone ensures that, aside from their positive influence on all the issues on the table, the impact of conflict on women forms part of the agenda," the envoy noted.
The negotiating table of the six-party talks with the aim of ending North Korea's nuclear programs have been male-dominant.
An official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Seoul said a few women have been involved in the team, yet the chief negotiators have always been male.
The situation isn't much different for the five other parties involved - China, Japan, Russia, the United States and North Korea.
The ambassador's comments on gender couldn't be timelier as he was making the remarks on the International Women's Day (last Monday).
He pointed out that gender is an important component of the Irish government's foreign aid.
The conflict resolution unit brought women from conflict zones - Northern Ireland, East Timor and Liberia - together and had them discuss women's protection and political engagement in conflicted areas so that "the women upon their return would be encouraged to take an active part in its leadership," McKee said.