Hello again from Inishowen Donegal, I am having a great time meeting alot of people, seeing sights here like the Northern point of Ireland and castles dolmens and mass rocks.  Today I went to my first Roman Catholic mass at St Patricks Church.  Yesterday, I went to a Famine Village that a man had made into an educational center.  It was thought provoking to me seeing exhibits depicting the lives of the Irish living in poverty.  There was also an exhibit about the travelers.  Travelers were a group of people like the gypses (from the word egyption) who lived together in caravans because they had nowhere perminit to live.  My friend Mary says there are stories that some of them are decended from the old Kings of Ireland.  There were also exhibits at the museum about republican safe houses and the orange men.  The Orange men were a group of Protestant Scottish settlers planted in Ulster around the time of James 1 on land taken from the catholics because the law that catholics were not allowed to own land.   They took there name from a William of Orange who won a battle against the Catholics in, I think the 17th century.  The Irish Republicans wanted an Independant Ireland and the Orangemen and republicans did not get along.   To this day much as it was hundreds of years ago only 6 counties in the north of Ireland have a significant number of protestants while the rest of Ireland's 26 counties are catholic, and there is still some hostility.  It was a good educational experience and did not seem biased one way or the other despite the fact that the propriter was Irish Catholic himself.  The fighting between the Orange men and the Republicans has got me thinking about how war and poverty are always seem to go hand in hand.  How many wars could be prevented if people aren't so caught up in greed and power?  All over the world it seems like all wars are the same, pointless.  Waste of time money.  There is the issue of justice.  Steeling the land from the catholics was wrong and justice is needed, but the majority of people killed in the fighting were civilians, and negotiations with the intent of settling the issue without hurting anyone could have gotten the same results maybe better, and without the loss of lives, provided the parties were invested above all else in fairness and the lives of the others.  Thats why I think the wars are a waste, and thats how the exhibit made me feel.  It also made me feel like if we think were so smart we should be learning from these things to prevent them from happening again in the future in other countries like Africa and Iraq.  So why are we not?

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