ST PAUL’S SIXTH YEARS LEAD THE WAY IN THEIR WORK FOR PERIOD JUSTICE!

This year we continued our successful campaign to highlight the effects of period poverty in Ireland and the impact it has on female education. Rang Tara worked with Ms Allen and the RE department to make sure that free sanitary products were available every school day in a designated bathroom. These products were purchased through fundraising carried out by Rang Tara who held an ice cream sale in September and a sweet sale in February. We would also like to thank the company Always who donated 18 boxes of sanitary towels and tampons to the school. Rang Tara also were involved in a letter writing campaign to their local TD’s in relation to the ‘Worryfree Campaign” that was promised in the Programme for Government. The students were delighted to receive responses from many Senators and TDs. The RE department plan to continue to work with our students to make sure that everyone has access to the sanitary products they need.

As part of their work relating to period justice in our school Rang Tara were inspired to help those outside of our school also. On January 16th we welcomed Mia de Faoite a guestpspeaker from Ruhama. Ruhama is a Dublin-based NGO that works on a national level with women affected by prostitution and other forms of commercial sexual exploitation. Mia spoke to the students about this very difficult topic and highlighted the great work the Ruhama does with the victims of sexual exploitation. Rang Tara then presented Mia with some care packs that they had created that were to be distributed to Ruhama’s services users. As a class they hoped that this would send a message to those who had been exploited that there are people who care about them.

Rang Tara continued their great work with a fundraiser that was held in aid of the Hygiene Bank Ireland. The students successfully raised €475 that was donated to this worthy charity. The students welcomed Mary Gilligan a past member of staff to our school on the 28th of February to collect the donation and also to speak to the class about the work that the Hygiene Bank does.

Lifelab

We were delighted to be offered the opportunity to visit LifeLab in DCU with a group of Transition Year students this year.

LifeLab at DCU is an interactive educational space for adolescents to Inspire, Explore and Develop Health and Health Literacy. The girls learned about different aspects of Health Literacy such as Sleep, Food and Diet, Mental Health to name a few.

We hope to introduce our 1st year students to LifeLab from September during SPHE classes.