Niall Breslin wins Social Just Hero Award from TU Dublin

Niall Breslin’s work in the fields of mental health and social justice has been recognised by the students of Technological University Dublin. As the latest recipient of the TU Dublin Social Justice Hero Award, he follows in the footsteps of Sr Stanislaus Kennedy and Tony Bates, founder of the mental health charity, Jigsaw.

Niall received the award in recognition of two projects that he organised during the pandemic, the Lockdown Ukulele Rockdown and the Lockdown Acapella Rockdown.

At the TU Dublin Student Volunteering Awards, held on online, Niall was interviewed by the chairperson for Student Volunteering at TU Dublin, Finn O’Neill and the Student Volunteering Champion Sami Corcoran.

He spoke about how mindfulness has helped him cope during the pandemic, and shared inspirational words with students: “Ask yourself what your values are. Ask yourself, to the lowest pit of your gut, what you stand for and what drives you, and when you are 95 and you are signing out of this world, what do you stand for and what do you want to be known as? They’re your values, and they are your north star.”

Niall said students and young people are the groups that will steer our futures, that activism is not about speaking to the people who already agree with us and that social media is not the answer.

“What we have to stop doing is using Twitter as a metric for humanity. It isn’t a metric for humanity,” he said.

The college said that the TU Dublin Student Volunteering Awards are a celebration of student volunteers in recognition of their contribution and show how much TU Dublin values students’ extra-curricular civic engagement activity, both on-campus and off-campus, despite the challenges of Covid, or indeed in response to them.