
2022 Mary Raftery journalism prize winner announced
Journalist Peter Maguire has won the Mary Raftery Prize for his feature on noteworthy.ie entitled ‘Speak or Survive: Sexual Violence Victims Still Fighting Roadblocks to Justice’. The Mary Raftery Prize is awarded annually to an individual or small team responsible for social affairs journalism produced on the island of Ireland in the calendar year preceding…

Ulster University leads on healthy ageing testbed in NI
The new healthy ageing testbed is trialling innovative approaches to tackling isolation and loneliness in older people. Northern Ireland has the most rapidly ageing population in the UK. The Northern Ireland consortium, led by Ulster University, has been awarded £50,000 as part of Connected Places Catapult, ‘Homes for Healthy Ageing Programme’. The funding from Connected…

Women from the Travelling Community Graduate from ‘life-changing’ UCC course
A group of women from the Travelling Community yesterday graduated at a conferring ceremony at UCC having completed a ‘life-changing’ course designed to empower leadership in their community. The Level 6 Leadership in the Community programme was co-created by the Southern Traveller Health Network; Adult and Continuing Education and supported by Access UCC. It serves…

Online peacebuilding course from WIT designer wins UNESCO award
A Peacebuilding in High Risk Communities course from the Centre for Technology Enhanced Learning instructional designer has been awarded the UNESCO OER Implementation Award for Excellence Neill Wylie, Instructional Designer with WIT’s Centre for Technology Enhance Learning and a Guest Lecturer at the institute is one of a number of people worldwide to receive the…

European Commission to create a digital earth – Destination Earth
The European Commission (EC) has announced the Destination Earth initiative to creat a digital model of the Earth to combat the effects of climate change. Destination Earth (DestinE) and its development of digital earth twins are key to predicting the effects and building resilience to climate-change according to the EC. DestinE aims to develop –…

Wind supplied one third of power in March – WEI
Wind Energy Ireland has released its March Wind Energy report, which showed that wind energy provided 33 per cent of Ireland’s electricity in March 2022. However, Ireland’s dependence on imported fossil fuels for much of electricity generation drove wholesale prices to the highest monthly average since the Integrated Single Electricity Market was set up in…

Immediate and transformative action needed to stay below 1.5°C – An Taisce
The IPCC released the third part of their Sixth Assessment report on April 6, focused on climate change mitigation and an assessment of methods for reducing and removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The report urges immediate and far reaching change in order to achieve the critical 1.5°C threshold on global heating. This will require…

Rapid change needed to meet net zero targets for livestock
A report published by the consortium CIEL (Centre for Innovation Excellence in Livestock) has identified that greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced if wide scale and highly effective mitigations are adopted on farms. The greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced from the main livestock types by 23 per cent and ammonia emissions by 15 per…

Met Eireann and NUIG team up on North Atlantic climate research
To improve understanding of the impact of the North Atlantic climate system on Ireland, Met Éireann is teaming up with climate researchers from NUI Galway – Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) to collaborate on a four-year project to improve its modelling using EC-Earth’s state-of-the-art Earth system model. EC-Earth is developed by a Europe-wide consortium…

Regional Education and Language Teams for Ukrainian families established
INTO President Joe McKeown has met with the Department of Education to discuss how primary and special schools could be best supported as Ukrainian families fleeing the war access education in Ireland. Minister for Education Norma Foley TD has announced the establishment of Regional Education and Language Teams (REALT) to support the needs of Ukrainian…

Cross-Border education partnership to support student teachers for equality-based schools
In conjunction with the Standing Conference on Teacher Education North and South, the Shared-Island Unit in the Department of the Taoiseach announced funding for a research project exploring provision enabling pre-service teachers to teach in diverse settings. Five partners are involved in the Educating About Difference Uniting Classrooms and Teacher Education (EDUCATE) action research…

Can DEIS really combat our entrenched inequality?
The recent announcement of an expansion to the DEIS scheme has raised questions about the ability of the education system to help disadvantaged student to overcome the hurdles they face. Does DEIS make a difference? Can it make up for the reality of inequality in Irish society? The data shows that targeting resources in the…

Dublin City University and National Flight Centre Pilot Academy
A New Flight Training Partnership in Dublin A new partnership between DCU Business School and the National Flight Centre Pilot Academy (NFC) was recently launched at Weston Airport, Dublin, by Simon Harris, T.D., Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science. This collaboration will enable students to complete the B.Sc. in Aviation Management…

ASSA ABLOY Door Group calls to raise the standard of fire safety in schools
Door Group, a unit of ASSA ABLOY Opening Solutions UK & Ireland, is stressing the need for greater awareness of fire safety in education buildings, with a large percentage of fire doors in schools found to be non-compliant while undergoing inspections. Fire doors are one of the most important safety features in a building and…

Griffith College and the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland award a Creative Bursary to five schools
The Faculty of Journalism and Media Communications at Griffith College once again collaborated with IAPI on the Creative Bursary for DEIS post-primary schools. The aim of this initiative is to encourage students to consider careers in creative commercial sectors. This year applicants were asked to submit a communications campaign explaining how their school practices sustainability,…

Race equality in Higher Education – more to do says new HEA report
A survey commissioned to capture the lived experience of higher education staff in relation to race equality has been released by the HEA’s Centre of Excellence for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.In the survey results, a majority agreed with the statement that ‘race inequality exists in Irish higher education. Respondents from minority ethnic groups were more…

Supreme Court boosts home schooling rights
The Supreme Court has ruled that the exclusion of home-schooled students from the 2020 Leaving Cert calculated grades scheme was invalid and an ‘impermissible’ interference with the constitutional freedom of the family to provide education in the home under article 42.2 of the Constitution.18-year-old Elijah Burke from Co Mayo was home-schooled by his mother, a…

TUI says campaign against pay discrimination goes on
The Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) has said that it remains committed to ending pay discrimination, which it says was unilaterally imposed by Government on those appointed since 1st January 2011 and continues to see teachers and lecturers paid on different pay scales for carrying out the same work.The union said that significant progress has…

Young scientists stand out from the swarm
The winners of the 58th BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition are Aditya Joshi and Aditya Kumar, 3rd year students from Synge Street, Dublin, for a project entitled “A New Method of Solving the Bernoulli Quadrisection Problem”.Professor Pat Guiry, Professor of Synthetic Organic Chemistry at UCD and Chair of Group Chemical, Physical & Mathematical Sciences…

€28m for school Energy Retrofit Pathfinder Programme in 2022
A €28m Schools Energy Retrofit Pathfinder programme that will demonstrate the approach to deep retrofit in the schools’ sector, testing energy efficiency solutions and renewable heat technology was announced in early January.This government-funded energy retrofit pathfinder programme will target energy use and carbon dioxide emission reduction by 51%, testing deep retrofit and low carbon heating…