Student brains go head-to-head in TCH Schools Quiz

IT will be a real battle of wits between North and South tonight when two secondary schools go head-to-head in the grand final of the Thomas Crosbie Holdings All-Ireland Schools Quiz.

Competing in the general knowledge contest will be teams from Patrician High School, Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan and St Aloysius Secondary School, Cork.

The national contest, in which almost 1,000 students and 150 teacher coaches were involved, will be broadcast live on Radio 1 at 7.01pm.

Regardless of which teams emerge victorious, the knock-out competition has already proven its worth by attracting a phenomenal 136 entries.

Organiser Barry Woods said they had received very positive feedback from many of the schools which were knocked out earlier in the competition.

From Donegal to Wexford and from Cork to Antrim, there had been a astonishing national response to the event, which commenced last November.

Mr Woods said the quiz, intended to be an annual event, very quickly established itself as an important national event on the educational calendar.

This was particularly evident from the number of entries received, especially from schools in the north, which actually outnumbered those received from schools based in the western counties.

“The interest shown has been very encouraging and proves that there is a place for the quiz within the educational system,” he said.

Tonight’s quiz will be opened by RTÉ’s director of radio, Adrian Moynes, followed by a special welcome address by TCH group managing director, Anthony Dinan.

Quizmaster Shane O’Donoghue will be putting the teams of two juniors and two seniors to the test in 10 rounds of general knowledge questions.

The winning team will be decided by the accumulation of the highest number of points.

At the end of the competition, Apple Ireland’s country manager, Liam Donohoe, will present the winners with a trophy and an “i-Cart”, a mobile laboratory worth in excess of 20,000.

Runners-up will be presented with an Apple eMac 800 computer.

The new TCH perpetual trophy, which will be presented to the captain of the winning team, is called the Andrew Quinlan Memorial Trophy.

Andrew captained the Christian Brothers College Cork team that won the former Cork Examiner Munster Schools Quiz in 1996.

Tragically, Andrew died in a car accident later in the same year.

The inaugural TCH quiz has its genesis in the former Cork Examiner Munster Schools Quiz, which ran with extraordinary enthusiasm and support from 1992 to 1999.

The new re-invented competition reflects the changing national face of TCH, the fastest-growing media group in Ireland.

The group, which recently purchased the London-based Irish Post, owns nine regional titles around Ireland, morning and evening dailies and a Sunday publication, as well as having substantial involvement in local radio and an electronic publishing division.