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Teacher Lisa Healy with Mercy Mounthawk students Ciara Samy, Darragh Hennessy and Judith Waugh highlighting meat-free Monday at the school. Photo by Dermot Crean
THE food counter in Mercy Mounthawk was a meat-free zone on Monday as part of a project to highlight climate change.
A number of Transition Year students are doing a project to enter in the ECO UNESCO Young Environmentalist Awards this year and decided to look at agriculture.
“After energy, agriculture is the biggest contributor of greenhouse gasses, it’s worse than transport,” said teacher, Lisa Healy.
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“The big offender in agriculture is meat production, so the students came up with the idea of a meat-free Monday just to raise awarness that we could and should be eating less meat and do our bit for the environment to try to reduce global warming. We’re not telling people not to eat meat, but to eat less of it,” said Ms Healy.
The canteen was only serving sandwiches, lasagnes and quiches without meat for Monday. The students’ project, ‘Climate Change In Action Is Inaction’, puts across the message that by doing nothing we are making the problem worse.
“We need to start making little changes. For teenagers the two things they have the most control over is what they eat and what they wear, so today targets the eating part and they are also going to organise a TY swap shop to encourage people to be less disposable with their clothes,” said Ms Healy.
