Scoil na gCeithre Máistrí fights back against littering

For this year's Arcadia Creative Climate Awards, pupils from the Scoil na gCeithre Máistrí gaelscoil in Athlone dedicated their project combating the scourge of littering around their school.

The theme for this year's awards was 'giving young people a voice', and the Scoil na gCeithre Máistrí pupils used theirs to come up with practical measured to help address the littering that can be an issue in communities up and down the country.

The school's fifth class students who participated in the Arcadia Creative Climate competition, Ruairí, Eoin, Kaci and Éabha, named their project 'Roth-Bish', and completed the written section of their project entirely as Gaeilge.

Scoil na gCeithre Maistri is located next to the Old Rail Trail greenway in Athlone. When pupils from the school noticed that there were no rubbish bins for a two-kilometre stretch of the greenway, they decided to take action. They also noticed that there were no external bins on their school grounds.

To combat this, they "built several bins and placed them on the greenway and around our school in order to alleviate littering and to make the community a cleaner place".

All of the bins which the pupils built were made using recycled tyres, which highlights Scoil na gCeithre Maistri's dedication to sustainability.

The annual awards, sponsored by Arcadia Retail Park, aim to get local primary and secondary schools thinking about how to help our environment.

The competition is run in conjunction with Cllr Frankie Keena's 'Junior Mayor' initiative, and concluded this year with an exhibition at the Technological University of the Shannon (TUS) in Athlone in April.

Following the exhibition, Niall Fowler, a teacher in Scoil na gCeithre Maistri, said the children "thoroughly enjoyed their day in TUS!"

The founder of the Junior Mayor Initiative, Cllr Frankie Keena, expressed his sincere thanks to the schools which participated in the Arcadia Creative Climate Awards this year.

"It was fantastic to see the level of confidence and depth of knowledge of the students on the subject matter as they explained their respective projects to members of the public. The student voice was just exceptional on the day," he said.

"These climate awards would not have taken place only for the marvelous sponsorship received from Fiachra McLoughlin, Arcadia Retail Park. The financial and hands on support from Fiachra is just fantastic who was ably assisted by Katie Gleeson and Morgan Fagg.

"We were absolutely thrilled to host these awards for the second year in a row at the TUS campus thanks to the marvelous and endless support from Joanne Gillivan.

"This brought the status of the event to a much higher level and it created a 'wow' factor for the students and staff," he concluded.