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In its short existence the Galway National Park City (GNPC) initiative, based on connecting people and nature in an urban environment and with an sustainability ethos, has had a positive impact on the local landscape providing opportunities and collaborations for citizens and organisations from different sectors to creatively work together on successfully developing new pioneering environmental and sustainability programmes.

The recent United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report signed off by 195 governments is a truly terrifying read. It makes clear that Global Warming- characterised by more intense and frequent heatwaves, storms, rainfall, flooding and melting glaciers as well as rising sea levels, is due to human activity. It further stated that no part of the world is safe from its consequences and that these changes are accelerating.

Over the last year, COVID has forced most of the population of Ireland to spend an unprecedented amount of their time at home. Cut off from family, friends and colleagues and unable to travel, home has changed from not only being our domestic abode but to also becoming our workplace, our gym and our play zone. But squeezing so much under one roof 24/7 is not easy and it can, if we allow it to, feel too often like a prison.

Last Thursday, President Michael D. Higgins gave a powerful thought-provoking speech to an online (via Webex) meeting of people of all ages drawn from a wide strata of local society on why the movement towards transforming Galway into a National Park City is so crucial at this particular time in human history due to unprecedented climate change, biodiversity loss and pandemics, and why it can be a template for other cities in Ireland to follow.

The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Interpretation, Florika Fink-Hooijer visited NUI Galway recently where she met with staff and students of the MA/PDip in Conference Interpreting, currently being taught at the University.