School living it up after helping bridge ethnic divide

DUBLIN’S O’Connell School was honoured by Lord Mayor Royston Brady yesterday for its effort to forge ties with children from many countries who live here.

The north city school, which ran a multicultural summer school for six weeks this year, took the top post-primary prize in the education category of the 2003 Guinness Living Dublin Awards.

“We set up the summer school four years ago to cater for a lot of foreign students who were in the school,” said Michael Kilbride, who began the project and runs the post-primary section at O’Connell’s. “Up to last year between 25% and 28% of our students would be foreign nationals and we have about 30 different nationalities.”

“I am delighted that we won, especially for Anne-Marie Nestor, a temporary teacher, who ran the summer school for the first time and did a very good job of it,” he said.

Mr Kilbride explained: “A lot of our foreign national students would be unaccompanied minors living in hostels and the idea was to give them something to do during the summer and to bring their level of English up to a standard where they could integrate with the local community and eventually with the Irish community.

“We wanted to avoid ghettos. English is the key to integration. If you haven’t got the language, you are not going to get integrated into sport or anything else. So we tried to give them the language first and let them off then,” said Mr Kilbride.

Funding for the summer school, which exceeded €20,000, came from the Department of Education, St Vincent de Paul and the Northern Area Health Board.

O’Connell School now goes forward for the overall prize.

The awards, in their 10th year, are a joint initiative of Dublin Chamber of Commerce, Dublin City Council and Diageo Ireland.