This article is from page 32 of the 2007-05-01 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 32 JPG
STUDENTS at Ennis Community College have been doing their bit to raise money for some of the world’s poorest people.
The school recently handed over a cheque worth almost €3,500 to Tro- caire after taking part in the organi- Zation’s annual 24-hour fast.
The students join the 15,000 other students nationwide that take part in Trocaire’s RTE 2fm 24-Hour Fast every year. This year’s fast helped raise essential funds for Trocaire’s long-term development projects in the world’s poorest countries.
The fast focused on India this year, where millions of people live in pov- erty, with little or no access to educa- tion or healthcare.
Despite the economic expansions of India in recent years, an estimated
27 million people still live in poverty in the two regions where Trocaire works. Many of the communities Troécaire supports are living without a clean water supply, without access to education and without the chance tO go.
Last year about 20,000 people over- all, raised over €lmillion through the fast for Trocaire’s long-term de- velopment programmes worldwide.
Teacher Catriona McNicholas said the students were eager to take part in the fast.
“We had around 61 students from Ennis Community College and the Gaelcholaiste taking part. They came from first year to sixth year, basically anyone who wanted to take part.”
She explained the school had been involved in a number of other fund- raising projects.
“They raised €550 for Daffodil
Day. One of the students went to Chernobyl! with St Joseph’s and some of the students raised €1000 for that nana
Meanwhile, a former student of Ennis Community College has won one of the most prestigious awards in Irish science.
In April, Iris Choi was the winner of the inaugural Rosse medal for graduate research in physics.
Iris won for presentation of her work in Quantum Cryptography. She is a member of the Tyndall Institute and University College Cork.
Ms Choi, originally from Hong Kong, gave details of her work, which seeks to securely encode and transmit information at the quantum arial
The medal commemorates the third Earl of Rosse (Sir William Par- sons KP, PRS) and his contributions
to science. The presentation of the medal was made by the seventh Earl of Rosse, Sir Brendan Parsons.
During the 1840s and starting from virtually first principles, the third Earl of Rosse, Sir William Parsons, designed and implemented the build- ing of the mirrors, tube and mount- ings for a 72 inch reflecting telescope which was the largest in the world at that time and remained so for three quarters of a century.