Irishmen and Irishwomen, people of Bornacoola, our parents and families, current and past pupils of Scoil Mhuire NS, present and former staff, we call on you today, to witness our Proclamation for future generations of our school, community and our country.

We thank all who went before us for the efforts they have made on our behalf over many generations since 1916. We now live in relative freedom and safety. We are very well looked after in our families and our school. We travel to school knowing that we are safe and can generally enjoy our day among our friends, in addition to being well educated. We have an excellent community and we are thankful to all who have made it happen for us. We have nice facilities and are well modernised compared to our peers of a century ago. We are proud of the way in which our community looks out for each other and will help people in need. We are lucky to have a nice school that is warm and comfortable, a community centre that caters for all our events, a youth club that keeps us occupied and where we make new friends and an active GAA Club that caters for our games.

We are delighted with the advances made in technology in the modern world and that our world is generally a much brighter place in 2016. Overall we have a lot to be thankful for. We are delighted to share our classrooms with people of other nationalities. We like to think we have welcomed them with open arms.

Looking ahead to the next 100 years we are hopeful, though, that many things will improve as we go through our lives. We are hopeful that there will be an end to racism in the world and that all people can get along together, irrespective of colour.  We should not bully people, or tolerate bullies. We should never hurt somebody’s feelings, and if we do we should apologise immediately.

Our local environment is precious and beautiful. We hope to do our best to protect it. The world faces many environmental challenges in the next century. We hope to play our part to protect it for many future generations. We will do this by being very careful not to pollute. We will make great efforts to recycle and reuse. We will plant more trees to provide oxygen for the world. We hope to see more electric cars to prevent fumes getting into the atmosphere.

We are aware that there is more crime and people can be afraid in their homes. We look forward to having more Gardaí and security systems to keep us safer. We do not like that there are many dangerous drugs in our world today and we hope that this can be cleaned up by so our country will be a safer place to live.

We are aware that there are many homeless people in this country and a lack of housing. We hope that this will be corrected in the near future and everybody can have a comfortable house to live in. There are many people hungry in our world and this is not good. We hope the world’s food can be shared out more equally in the future. We hope scientists can come up with cures for many diseases that affect our world today.

We hope our country recovers fully from the economic crash and that we will not have to emigrate and we can get a good job in the country that we love. We hope our new government can work hard to provide a better health service and that if we get sick, or when we get old, we can be well looked after. We need more hospitals and an end to patients lying on trolleys.  

We hope that future generations will continue to be happy in our school. Going to school today is a lot different than in our grandparents’ days. We hope education can continue to develop and that we can get lots of exercise to keep us healthy as we mature. We hope that future pupils will get along with each other as we feel that we do, generally. We hope that we, and future generations will be positive about life and not feel in any way bad about ourselves.

We look forward to how our lives will unfold and that we will try our best to be the best we can be.

15th March 2016.