Report from Mercy College Woodford Students on a Year of Activism

Report from Mercy College Woodford Students on a Year of Activism
By Megan Mulcahy and Catriona Patience

Students at Mercy College Woodford recently won an award from the Bank of Ireland for “Best Group”, beating off stiff competition from the many other groups in the many other schools in the area, including EVERY sports group.
With this in mind, we have put together a summary of what we did last year, which helped us to win the award. This is just a snapshot summary of some of the things that we got up to during a very active year.
In November we started a practical project. At the time we had been sending many letters to many important people, especially regarding the situation in Israel/OPT protesting against the so-called ‘defence wall’. We decided to inform our fellow students about what was going on. We made our own ‘wall’ in the school, made up of ‘bricks’ cut from paper. On these we wrote, printed, and painted our messages of solidarity with the Palestinian people, and expressing our hope for the future. Mr Conroy, our teacher, also made copies of films that were relevant to the issue and stuck them on to the ‘bricks’ for people to take and distribute and put back up again. We did not ask for permission from the school authorities to put up this wall, symbolising how the Israelis built their wall without Palestinian consent. The wall was erected during class time, when no one was suspecting (again mirroring the Israeli approach). This was a very effective project – many students got really engaged with the issues and lots joined our group.
During March our Amnesty group did a photography-based project against Guantanamo Bay detention facility. We dressed up in orange jump suits, like the ones worm by Guantanamo inmates, and wore white masks. We took pictures outside the school with a huge wire fence in the background, which symbolised the prison. Each picture featured one student and each student held up a letter. When we put all the photographs together on a wall of the school it spelt out the message AMNESTY @ MCW SAYS CLOSE GUANTANAMO. The singer Gary Dunne (www.garydunne.com) later used these pictures in one of his music videos, ‘Simple Truth’. With the arrival of Barach Obama as president of the United States, it looks like our message was successful.
In May we were invited by Amnesty Ireland to meet Brian Cowen on his first day in office. We had, with us, 250 postcards signed against the treatment of people in China. This is more signatures than we have students in the school – every teacher also signed up. On arrival outside the Dáil we met up with about 5 other schools, mostly from Dublin, and we all put on our Amnesty bibs and t-shirts. With lots of placards and enthusiasm, we grouped together for photographs in front of the Dáil. We were later on the 5 o’clock news on TV3. Unfortunately we did not get to meet Mr Cowen as he was in Northern Ireland. However, between all of us we did get to hand in over 4,000 postcards for Mr Cowen to read on his return.
We’re looking forward to a very active year again next year.