Declan's Story in Dublin

Declan is from Dublin and is currently studying for his masters in religion. He has worked as a psychoanalyst in the past but has a great passion for education and is hoping to pursue a PhD in the future. He shares his story below.

“I was in Egypt about two years ago and I was leaving Egypt, and one of the guys who was there, a guide in Egypt, just said to me that he was fluent in German and he had to go to Germany to study, to update his German skills or whatever, and he pointed to my passport and he said ‘you don’t know how valuable that is’. And that kind of struck me, that when I left Egypt there was still protests going on in Tahir Square and we were on a British Airways flight and we got on the plane and we could just leave and they couldn’t, and that really struck me, that, that just the pure happenstance of birth would have such a huge impact on my life and on the people there, and on their lives and what they could and couldn’t do – like me, I landed in the UK and I mean, I’m white so there’s all that, there’s just an understated privilege that just comes with being white, male and European [laughs] and actually, sometimes we’re really not aware of it you know we kind, of it’s just, it was only really when that guy pointed it out, pointed out my passport, I kinda went ‘wow yeah it really is there’, I mean I probably knew it at some unconscious level but it needed somebody to say that to me to realise that privilege we take for granted.”

You get familiar with the customers in the shop. There’s one woman who comes in all the time and she loves Churchill and Agatha Christie so everything that comes in with those authors, we know to put that aside for her for her when she comes in. She’s usually in at least once a week, and, em, yeah and I think we’re actually part of her family in a strange way… she’s an, an elderly lady and she loves the fact we remember her name, we’ve kept books aside for her and… I’m just amazed at the range of her interests, it could be from something she’d pick up in philosophy to an Agatha Christie movie, or book, to a historic, a history of Kitchener or something like that. I mean the range of her … and that’s what struck me most is that like people come in the door and you have an idea of what they’re like and then they come up with this incredible, sometimes incredible range of books, you know, wow, it’s… We’ve one guy who comes in and, eh, he’s a bread man and he’s interested in science and we have to say ‘dumb it down for us’, because he’s talking about quantum theory or something like that and we have no idea usually what he’s talking about, it’s almost a joke. He has three grand pianos in his house, who’d have guessed it, you know what I mean? So what I’m saying in a very long-winded way is that I didn’t realise I had so many preconceptions and how quickly you jump to conclusions about where people are from, what kinda stuff they do, what they would be interested in or whatever their level is at and yet they constantly surprise you with just the range, the breadth of people, of human knowledge, of how even people who may have a very ordinary job have such an extraordinary mind”