TY Diary – TYs dance in Galway and retreat in Connemara

THERE were some shocked faces in Supermacs last Tuesday when the Presentation Tuam Transition Year girls brought Thriller to Supermacs on the Headford Rd. Don’t worry, there is some reasoning behind this madness! We decided to dance to Thriller and put it up on Youtube because we want to raise money for Pieta House.
For every view our video gets, Supermacs is donating money, which we will give to Pieta House. While we knew what was going on, the customers in Supermacs and in the shopping centre had no clue! So you can imagine their surprise when a load of dressed-up girls broke out in Thriller. Our video on Youtube is called Thriller at Supermacs.
As well as dancing to Thriller, the TY girls set off to Tully Cross in Connemara for a retreat on the same day. We stayed in a beautiful little thatched cottage. On Wednesday we set off on a lovely walk to the beach. The sun was splitting the rocks and nearly all of us had sunburn by the end of the day. While we were at the beach we discovered that we weren’t the only ones who were enjoying the sun. To our surprise, five cows showed up as well!
The walk back to the cottage was rather difficult. In total, the walk to and from the beach was 9km. We may have found the walk difficult, but we enjoyed it. After all our walking, we had a lovely barbeque so it was well worth it. We then went for another walk to the shop and went to the pitch and had a game of football. And, of course, we went to bed nice and early!
On Thursday, we had our official retreat. Our former religion teacher Ms Glynn came out and gave us the retreat. We bonded through it and learned how to ‘let our light shine’. It was a great experience and great fun and certainly was a trip we will never forget! We thank Ms. Glynn for giving us the retreat.
Last Saturday we ventured up to Dublin to compete in the Public Access to the Law competition. The competition was held in the criminal courts and it truly was a nerve-racking but brilliant experience. There were many great schools that we had to go up against and in total we won two out of three cases. Aoife Kelleher did us proud and came second in her news presenting competition. Although we didn’t get to New York we all had a really good day and it was a great learning experience.
As we are approaching the end of the year one would think our schedule wouldn’t be as busy, but it’s quite the opposite! Last week we were gone most of the week and this Wednesday we are going up to Dublin for the Young Social Innovators competition. We have two groups in the official showcase — YOUthCAN and Grey to Green. The TY block is a bit hectic at the moment as we are trying to prepare for the showcase. The WheelieZone group is in the poster campaign part of YSI.
Although we are all stressed about it we cannot wait to go up because previous TYs have told us that it’s such good fun! We cannot wait to go and show everyone all our work.
Even though all this chaos is going on we still have to keep on top of our academic side of things, especially now that our summer tests are coming up, but that’s exactly what Transition Year has taught us, how to balance everything! So there is no doubt that us girls will ace those tests! — Alana Folan