EDITORIAL: 'You'd have to go back to 1989 when Grace O'Connor and Sinéad Finn won'
In this week's Nationalist
In case you haven’t heard, two Tipperary students have gone and won the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition competition.
In terms of overall winners of the competition from Tipperary, you’d have to go back to 1989 when Grace O’Connor and Sinéad Finn from the Ursuline, Thurles won for “A Study on a Crop Fractation Industry”.
Shane O’Connor and Liam Carew are 18-years-old and are in Sixth Year in The Abbey School and 34 years later they’ve achieved the same feat as the Ursuline students over three decades ago.
That certainly puts this latest victory for the Premier County into a bit of context and what a remarkable achievement by the students and their school with excellent reporting on the lads’ homecoming on page 13 of this week’s paper by Tipperary Town correspondent, Martin Quinn.
It’s a huge achievement by the boys and both they and the school deserve huge credit for the work that went into the project.
These wonderful men won the top prize for their work on “Assessing the impact of second-level education on key aspects of adolescents’ life and development”.
This was a three-year study that covered the years of Covid; 2020, 2021 and 2022, and assessed students throughout those years in a longitudinal way on the impacts of Covid but also the impacts of school overall on students.
Chair of the Social and Behavioural Sciences Group Judging Panel, Professor Joe Barry, described the winning entry as a very impressive survey.
“One of the key findings coming out of the research was that whilst inequality is prevalent in DEIS schools, exponential improvements in areas of pastoral care and physical health are quickly closing this gap,” Prof Barry said.
The Tipperary students will represent Ireland at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists, which takes place in Brussels, Belgium in September 2023.