Online quiz led to ‘life changing’ European trip for two Mayo students

Two Castlebar students brought fresh energy to Castlebar Municipal District's council chamber on Wednesday, recounting how a free online quiz sent them on a life-changing trip to the European Parliament.

Nevan Lynch and Emer Cronin addressed councillors and officials about their experiences winning places on the graduate.ie student competition — an online quiz that runs over 20 weeks of the school year and challenges secondary students to learn about local government, national politics, and EU affairs through weekly multiple-choice questions.

The competition is often taken up as part of CSPE or Transition Year programmes, with winners selected at random and rewarded with a sponsored trip to the European Parliament.

Civic engagement

Síofra Kilcullen, Mayo County Council's Director of Services for Corporate Services, Human Resources and Organisational Efficiency, told the meeting the council's involvement with the programme stretches back roughly 20 years, crediting former officials Joe Loftus and John Condon as early champions of the initiative. Mayo is one of just eight local authorities nationwide taking part.

Kilcullen said the quiz has quietly built awareness among young people of the work local authorities do, at a time when public bodies can feel "remote" and "indecipherable" to the public.

With Ireland currently holding the EU presidency, she said the programme's message about civic engagement feels especially relevant this year, and she used the council meeting as an opportunity to remind students the competition has relaunched.

‘This changed me’

Nevan Lynch, who won his trip to Strasbourg in 2024, described the European Parliament visit as the standout moment of the experience — sitting alongside hundreds of students from across the EU, all competing for the chance to speak. He said getting picked to address the chamber left him thinking of Mayo Captain Jack Coyne as he tried to settle his nerves, and that the sense of connection with other young delegates carried on long after the formal proceedings, with students talking about their home communities into the early hours back at the hotel.

Lynch said the trip reshaped his outlook after six years in an all-boys school, where he felt it was easy to slip into "toxic masculinity" without thinking twice about casual remarks.

“ I spent six years in a school with just lads, and it's very easy to fall into the trap of toxic masculinity and all of the quick comments that you don't put much thought behind it, but with trips like this and to be able to see and develop reasoning. That's what this trip did for me. I just knew as soon as I was there, this has changed me. I didn't feel the same as when I first got on the plane,” he told the meeting.

He credited the experience with steering him toward studying Politics and Society for his Leaving Cert and, now in his first year of engineering at college, with pushing him to get involved in student societies and community initiatives, including five consecutive years of the Mayo Pink Ribbon campaign.

Ballinrobe-based Councillor Michael Burke asked Lynch where he was from, and on learning it was Breaffy, warned him local politicians would be "keeping an eye" on him, while Councillor Cyril Burke joked he'd soon be ready to retire.

Emer Cronin, from Ballyvary and a student at St Joseph's Secondary School, travelled on the programme in 2023. She told councillors the trip was one of the most memorable experiences of her time in secondary school, and that she first heard about the quiz through her SPHE teacher. Cronin said she had known little about the workings of the council beforehand, and that the competition gave her a reason to find out more.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme