Amnesty Ireland director visits Gort students

COLM O’Gorman, executive director of Amnesty International Ireland, visited South Galway on Thursday  last and spoke to students in Gort Community School.
Over the past two decades, Gort CS students have worked both inside and outside the classroom to take action and speak out about fundamental human rights concerns.
“Working with Amnesty is something we have been doing for a period of time,” explained Junior Certificate student Leanne O’Toole. “This was part of our CSPE project for Junior Cert. We did it as a class,” added Leanne O’Toole, who is from Ardrahan.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees each person protection for our rights and Gort students have always been at the forefront of tackling both local and global concerns.
“In raising awareness of human rights, we looked up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and learned about all the different rights and how people are deprived of their rights,” explained Leanne.
As well as addressing the students, Mr O’Gorman viewed some of the projects of previous years and enjoyed a recital performed by music students.
“As part of the project, we took a really well-known song by Mumford and Sons, Little Lion Man. We changed the words using the rights in the declaration. We taught this to first years and got someone to record it. Then we got in touch with Colm O’Gorman and he said he would be happy to come to the school. He actually said he had been wanting to come here for a while because students have worked on so many projects over the years, raising awareness of human rights. When he was here, we performed the song for him with all the music students,” she continued.
Junior Cert student, Kim Daffy from Crusheen, believes one of the highlights of Mr O’Gorman’s speech to the students was his emphasis on human rights at local level.
“He asked us did we think we were deprived of our human rights here in Ireland. He asked us what we thought of education in Ireland. Supposedly, we are meant to have free education in Ireland but is it really free when we have to pay for uniforms, books and transport? This really got us thinking that it is not just in other countries that people are deprived of their human rights, that it is happening here too,” she outlined.
“The project and the talk really opened our eyes and Mr O’Gorman seemed really impressed with our performance of the song and our efforts at raising awareness of human rights,” Kim continued.
Indeed so impressed was Mr O’Gorman that he invited those involved in the project in Gort to attend a special celebration of Amnesty’s 50 years in Ireland next month.