We were sorted into groups and the group I was in was organising events for St.
Patrick's day. The group came up with ideas ranging from handing out free Irish
products to being in the parade. We then decided to e-mail Gaurenteed Irish to
see if they had any suggestions but Tom Rae, the person working with us, was
away. We decided to keep our project local and do something in the parade. We
organised for a truck to be used as a float in which we could stand on the back
of during the parade. We hope to use our banners in the parade with our slogans
to promote buying Irish products too. We have also organised costumes to be used
for the event. The costumes are going to be of Irish products such as a Cadbury
bar, a Goodfellas pizza, etc. We will be using the costumes again for more
promotion. We are planning to go down to the local shops and ask them if they
would like their logo / shop name to be promoted in the St. Patrick's Day
parade.

We decided to do a cooking competition with the fifth year home ec students in the school. The students were in groups of two cooking together. They had to cook something that consisted of at least 4 Irish products. The prizes for 1st and 2nd place were to be a variety of Irish food products with a "Be Irish, Buy Irish" wristband. After we decided all this we went to the 5th years home ec teacher to ask for permission if it was ok to do the cooking competition in her home ec class. Once we got the go ahead we made picture slides to go on the
monitors in school to advertise the cooking competition. After this we then went and bought the prizes for the competition.On the day of the competition the home ec teacher started off the competition and then we went down to the competition near the end so that three of the classmates and the home ec teacher could taste each of the dishes and check all irish ingredients gone into it. After we tasted all the dishes we all
deliberated on what dish should win and we decided that the winners dish should consist of both a lot if irish products, originality and good taste. Once we agreed on the winners we then introduced ourselves to the class and congratulated each of them on their efforts and thanked them for taking part and we then gave out the prizes. Overall the cooking competition was a great success. We encouraged more people to buy Irish products and everyone enjoyed the cooking competition too.

For our YSI project, Be Irish Buy Irish, we wanted to get as many Irish products into our school as possible. So we came up with the idea of changing one of the vending machines in our school to all Irish products.
Some of the products in the vending machine were already Irish so we just had to change some of them. We decided to change them to Twirls, Flakes, Cadburys golden crisp bars, Tayto and caramel nibbles. We had to look up the amount of calories in each of them because there’s a limit in our school that we couldn’t
go over. To make it clear to people that all the products are irish we are making irish stickers to put on the vending machines. By doing this were promoting Irish products in our school.

We wanted to do something down town to show local people what our project was about. So we
came up with an idea to do a moving theatre with 3D costumes of Irish products.
We got into groups and started to design our costumes. It is a very fun and
artistic way of getting our project across. We are hoping to soon go down town in our costumes to show people what products are Irish. Some of the products we are using are Dairy Milk, Ballygowan Water, Barry’s tea and Tic Tacs.

We worked in conjunction with the new Ross echo who helped us with promoting our
project and also the importance of buying local. We emailed Brendan Keane who
writes articles for the echo and asked him if it would be possible to have an
article which we wrote put into the paper. We sent him on a draft of put article
and he made the necessary and our article about the importance of buying locally
was put into the paper the following week. This article really got our message
across and helped us communicate the imporatnce of buying both locally and irish
to the wider new ross community.

We wanted to make a list of the top 40 Irish products and think of a way to let
people know whats out there.  We went onto the Love Irish Food and Guaranteed
Irish websites to make our list.  When we had made out our list we decided that
the best way to show it to the public was by putting an advertisment in the
newspaper.  We e-mailed the New Ross Echo and asked if we could put in an
advertisment and they said we could.  We deicided that we wanted people to be
able to cut out the advertisment and maybe put it on their fridge so we wanted a
cut out line around the edge of the advertisment.  We hope that by putting an
advertismnt in the paper that people will see what products are Irish and will
hopefully spend more on Irish products.  We also contacted the Irish Farmers
Journal and asked if we could write a small paragraph outlining what the
different food symbols mean.

YSI–Bands.


We had wanted to sell bands as part of our project from the very
beginning, we had seen other organisations use them as a way to promote their
message and we saw that it worked very well for them. We emailed many websites
we thought to be Irish and got back many quotes. After further research we were
disappointed to find that they do not make wristbands anywhere in Ireland, The
most ‘Irish made’ we could find them was you could order wristbands from abroad
through Irish-run websites. Many websites were much too expensive for us to buy
from as we had already spent a lot of the money in our account on printing
booklets. We found one website that had the perfect design for
us, and they were very cheap (roughly 0.20c per wristband if we sold all 600.)
We decided to buy from these. We emailed a man called Ben and designed our  bands (green, debossed ‘ Be Irish Buy Irish ’ on the front and ‘ YSI ’13 ’ on the back. We payed with the school
credit card (under the supervision of our principle.) A couple of days later the
bands arrived and they were perfect. We decided to sell them for €1 each and they were very popular because of this. Anyone in our class who wanted to sell them had the opportunity and
everyone was so helpful.  We are now in the middle of selling our bands and they are selling very
well.


  


 
 

We decided that it would be a good idea to make a brochure of Irish gift idea's
targeting the Christmas shopping market. This involved a lot of hard work as we
had a deadline to meet. We got in touch with a designer from Bluebella Designs
through Guaranteed Irish. Firstly we had to research and choose a selection of
Guaranteed Irish products that we felt would be suitable as Christmas Gifts. We
then designed the a draft of the layout of what we wanted our brochure to look
like and posted this to the designer. We had to contact each of the companies to
seek their permission to use their products. When we were happy with the design
of our brochure we sent it to print, we covered the printing costs with the
money raised from our bake sale. We were delighted with our brochures when they
arrived and we distributed them to each family in the school through the
December news letter and locally around New Ross.

Our schools Open Night was on Tuesday the 20th of November 2012. For this night we, as Transition years, were given a room in which we could promote our Young Social Innovators project, “Be Irish, Buy Irish.”

We constructed a brochure highlighting all of the Irish brands that are in shops or that are available in and around New Ross. We also have a comparison of Irish brand prices against foreign brand prices i.e. Heinz ketchup against chef ketchup.We handed these brochures out to the parents of the girls who came in.

We made stickers on which we stated our YSI project name, and also our class.

We bought Irish decorations like ribbons, balloons and Irish flags. We decorated the room with these. We also hung up posters on the walls. The posters contained information on what products are Irish and what products are foreign or imported. We spent the last week drawing out and colouring a massive poster promoting our main point “Spend €4 extra on guaranteed Irish products and you could create 6,200 jobs.”

We painted shamrocks and Irish flags on our cheeks and we offered face painting of Irish flags and Irish tattoos to the possible future mercy students who came into open night.

We did taste tests where we had Club orange and Tayto versus Fanta orange and Walker’s. While the majority of people preferred Walker’s crisps, most people preferred Club orange over Fanta.

We conducted a quick survey with everyone who visited our room where we asked them where they usually shop, what they would buy, and if they would be willing to buy Irish.

Overall, the night was a big success and we all had a lot of fun.

Our YSI class also organised a raffle. The girls on the hamper committee contacted local businesses asking them to donate Irish products to us in order for us to make up hampers. We made three hampers, one food and two beauty hampers. The raffle tickets were sold at the bake sale but all money made was going to our class only. The raffle tickets continued to be sold then throughout the week until Monday 17th December when the tickets were pulled near the end of our carol service, form the raffle we made over €300 and that, along with what we made from the bake sale, allowed us to pay the publishers of the brochure and also have some money left over for future expenses. Both ventures were a great success.