UL student wins top prize for video exploring Ireland's national card game, 25

David Connors' piece focused on a '25' card tournament where he spoke to both young and old enjoying what is for many the national card game of Ireland.

A video project entitled “25 ... What do you know about Ireland's national card game?” has earned David Connors, a MA in Journalism student at the University of Limerick, top prize in the inaugural Irish Examiner / University of Limerick video journalism competition.

Fergal Quinn, UL, David Connors, UL, Diane McDermott. Credit: Cian Reinhardt

His piece focused on a '25' card tournament in Tubber, Co Clare, where he spoke to both young and old enjoying what is for many the national card game of Ireland.

The competition is the culmination of a partnership between UL and Landmark Digital, publishers of irishexaminer.com and breakingnews.ie, in which coursework produced by UL journalism students’ was broadcast to a national audience.

Multimedia pieces produced by the BA and MA classes were chosen from examples of coursework and broadcast on the website during the month of May.

David's video was chosen by a panel of judges based on a variety of metrics including journalistic merit, popularity on site and levels of engagement across social media.

Irish Examiner Editorial Manager Diane McDermott, who presented Mr Connors with his €500 prize this week, said they were delighted with the standard of entries from UL students.

Lecturer in Broadcast Journalism at University of Limerick Fergal Quinn congratulated Mr Connors on his win:

David is a really talented young journalist, and his package took a closer look at a corner of rural life that is rarely explored. I thought he really engaged with the human centre of the story and showed a visual flair in doing so.

“It was hard to choose a winner this year. There was a wide range of topics and a very high standard of work produced by our students which attests to quality of our young journalism graduates.”

“I’m grateful to the Irish Examiner for supporting what was a really interesting collaboration, both from a student and teacher perspective”

Irish Examiner digital editor, Dolan O'Hagan, congratulated all who contributed.

Many of these stories would otherwise have remained untold and when all of the nonsense is stripped away is there a more important function for journalism than that?

Here's David's winning video: