The Irish World Music Café at the University of Limerick (UL) is more than just a weekly gathering spot—it’s a powerful model of cultural connection, social integration, and peacebuilding through music.
Founded in 2015, the café emerged within the Irish Refugee Protection Programme through a partnership between UL’s Irish World Academy of Music & Dance and Doras Luimní, a community organisation supporting migrants in Limerick. Originally a pop-up event, it evolved into a weekly fixture from 2022 onward, held Mondays at UL’s City Campus, led by Ewa Zak-Dyndal alongside community figures like Ahmed Hassan and Serhii Korobstov.
The Café hosts informal, music-led gatherings featuring free food, open-mic performances and diverse artistic exchanges, providing a space of hospitality and shared creativity for new migrants and local residents alike. Drawing on the “Singing and Sustainable Social Integration” research framework led by Prof. Helen Phelan, the café uses social singing and video documentation to nurture alternative community values and promote social change.
The café embodies UL’s PERC principles, Participatory, Ethical, Reflexive, Creative, encouraging mutual engagement and shared cultural understanding. Through music, participants from Congolese rumba groups like Elikya to spontaneous guest performers forge emotional bonds and cross-cultural boundaries, fostering both personal healing and community cohesion.
With ethnographic research underscoring its effectiveness, the café’s live and recorded sessions highlight music’s role in sustainable social integration and alternative value systems. It also operates as a peacebuilding initiative, reflecting Ireland’s broader commitment to conflict resolution and social reconciliation, sharing the country's own Northern Ireland peace experience. By bringing together new communities and local residents in informal camaraderie, the café contributes to grassroots peace and intercultural solidarity, weaving the social fabric of Limerick more tightly.
The Irish World Music Café at UL showcases the transformative power of music to heal, unite, and empower. It’s a microcosm of peacebuilding in action—where songs, rhythms, and shared voices bridge divides. In today’s fragmented world, its message rings clear: when we come together as equals, irrespective of origin and create, we build not just art, but community, compassion, and lasting peace.
