Evening

Duration: 6 weeks

Dates: 11 October – 22 November 

Time & Day: Thursday 7.00pm-9.00pm 

Cost: €100

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This six-week Introduction to Psychology evening course aims to provide students with an understanding of Psychology. You will consider the importance of how we think, feel and behave and how these three factors impact on our relationships with ourselves, others and society. This short course offers insights to the subconscious, our learning styles, and the ways we often try to meet ideals and standards set down by society. It is an exciting and challenging course designed to equip students with a deeper comprehension of the study of psychology.

Topics covered include:

• Psychology past, present and future
• Psychological explanations for prejudice and discrimination
• Psychoanalysis and its relevance to personality
• Behavioural Psychology and how it works
• Social Psychology and relating to others
• The science and politics of mental health

Duration: 8 weeks

Dates: 4 October – 29 November 

Time & Day: Thursday 7.00pm-9.00pm 

Cost: €125

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From pets and politics to love, death and anxiety, the study of philosophy can help us to understand life the universe and everything around us. This course introduces us to the thought of some of the most interesting observers of life in these areas. Perfect for the beginner, or further food for thought for those who already have an interest in these vast questions.

Topics covered include:

• Introduction to philosophy: How it can help us understand the world we live in
• Do our lives have meaning?
• Death
• Anxiety
• Love
• Pets
• Politics
• Truth and lies in the age of social media.

Duration: 8 weeks

Dates: 4 October – 29 November 

Time & Day: Thursday 7.00pm-9.00pm 

Cost: €125

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This evening course will explore Ireland during the era of war and revolution to examine the events that shaped modern Ireland. By investigating primary sources, film, documentaries and through lectures and discussion this course will introduce you to the history of Ireland during one of its most turbulent eras. In studying the complex lives lived in the midst of political and revolutionary chaos we can understand the motivations of those who fought on all sides, and for all causes, as well as those who sought political solutions.

Topics covered include:

• Home Rule
• The Great War
• Easter Rising
• Irish War of Independence
• Civil War
• Foundation of the Free State

Duration: 8 weeks

Dates: 4 October – 29 November 

Time & Day: Thursday 7.00pm-9.00pm 

Cost: €125

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This evening course in Theology is an introduction to key concepts, ideas, and topics that contribute to the shaping of religious identity in contemporary culture. Over the course of eight evenings participants will read, interpret, and discuss a series of writings that explore religious questions in ways that speak to fundamental questions in our culture.

Topics covered include:

• Introduction to Terminology
•  Contemporary Questions around Belief
• Identity, Belonging, and Place
• Reading Between the Lines: Interpreting Texts
• Jesus at the Movies: New Sites and Productions of Religious Culture
• Traces of the Transcendent in Poetic
  and Prophetic Voices
•  Reading the Signs of the
  Time Liberation Theology

Duration: 8 weeks

Dates: 24 January – 21 March 

Time & Day: Thursday 7.00pm-9.00pm 

Cost: €125

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Ulysses, James Joyce’s open love letter to his partner, Nora Barnacle, to his native-city, Dublin, and to the world, is a work that changed literature forever.  Regardless of whether you love it or loath it, regardless of whether or not you’ve even read it, this novel has influenced your life, such is the impact it has had on writers, and film-makers, around the world since its publication in Paris, in 1922.

Set entirely in Dublin, and unfolding over the course of a single day, the 16 June, 1904 (the date the author first ‘walked out’ with Nora Barnacle), it tells the story of Dublin and its inhabitants with un-beguiled love, and does so in such depth and detail that Joyce maintained that were it ever destroyed, Dublin could be rebuilt using his book as a guide.

How many times have you promised yourself ‘I’m going to read Ulysses this year’, but never got around to it?  Or perhaps you started into it, but couldn’t get beyond the first chapter (or the first page).  You are not alone!  Indeed, this is the real tragedy of ‘the greatest novel ever written’ – so few people actually read it.

This course of classes will take you through Joyce’s novel, chapter by chapter, in a manner that will emphasise the readability of this most comic, and tragic, of modern love stories.

Duration: 8 weeks

Dates: 24 January – 21 March 

Time & Day: Thursday 7.00pm-9.00pm 

Cost: €125

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This course explores life in Europe during the period AD 1200-1500 – known as ‘the High Middle Ages’. The focus is on everyday life and experiences rather than elite politics and religion. The course will provide background and context and no prior knowledge is expected. You will have plenty of opportunity to engage with medieval sources and discuss these with lecturers and fellow students.

Topics covered include:

• Childhood, Youth and Education
• Diet and Standards of Living
• Work in Town and Countryside
• Piety and Heresy
• Medieval Drama
• Famines, Plagues and Natural Disasters
• Medieval Warfare

Duration: 8 weeks

Dates: 24 January – 21 March 

Time & Day: Thursday 7.00pm-9.00pm 

Cost: €125

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Irish identity is a changing phenomenon. Today we are confronted with a variety of identities all claiming their place in the sun. What is identity? Is there such a thing as Irish identity or was there ever such a thing? What has influenced current ideas on Irish identity? This course will address such questions with lectures from a variety of perspectives. It will look at the nature of identity, and the impact of tradition, gender, ethnicity and social change on the creation of identity.

Topics covered include:

• What is identity?
• Identity & Social Change
• Identity & Tradition
• Ethnicity & Identity
• Ability & Disability
• Identity & Spirituality
• Gender & Identity
• Roundtable discussion

Duration: 8 weeks

Dates: 24 January – 21 March 

Time & Day: Thursday 7.00pm-9.00pm 

Cost: €125

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The world as seen through the work of songwriters and poets Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon

This course aims to introduce students to the work of the Canadian and American writers Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon – two of the most challenging, literate and exciting songwriters of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Over sixteen hours of workshops we will explore the written and sung words, philosophies, politics and social stances of these writers. We will examine the influence of their Jewish backgrounds on their writing and on their philosophies and follow the paths of Judaism; Christianity and Buddhism in their work. The course will be exciting; filled with music and discussion and will illuminate the world in the light of Cohen and Simon’s work.

Topics covered included:

• The biographical backgrounds of Cohen and Simon and that influence in their songs
• Cohen’s journey from novelist and poet to songwriter
• The influence of the folk and civil rights movements on Paul Simon
• Mortality in the songs of Cohen and Simon
• A spiritual dimension in Simon’s songs
• A spiritual journey as outlined in Leonard Cohen’s songs
• Love and fathers in the songs of Cohen and Simon
• An overview of the pair and their work

John MacKenna is a writer, director and actor. He is the author of nineteen books. A former Commissioning Editor and presenter with RTE , he won a Jacobs Radio Award for his documentary series on Leonard Cohen, with whom he had a thirty-five year friendship. He has also made a number of documentaries with Paul Simon.