Taking part in competition was ‘life-changing experience for us’
Certified Irish Angus schools competition
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Shane King, Eoin Robinson and Jack Larkin, students from Mercy Secondary School, Kilbeggan, are the overall winners of the 2025 Certified Irish Angus Schools Competition. Below they write about their experiences.
We are over the moon to have been named as the winners of the Certified Irish Angus Schools competition. Our journey in the competition began tin September 2022, at the start of transition year, and since then we have had an amazing experience and so many once in a lifetime opportunities have been presented to us.
Our project focused on how technology can be used to improve Angus cattle breeding. We noticed that a lot of people found breeding evaluations and indexes difficult to understand and that it took a long time to compare figures when selecting an AI bull.
We identified the problem and founded our website Angus to the Fore to simplify the process of finding suitable bulls for farmers.
We also developed a podcast series where we interviewed successful people in the agricultural industry, including Ryanair CEO and Angus farmer Michael O’Leary and Irish rugby legend and Angus breeder Rory Best.
Bringing farming into the 21st century using technology like we have is encouraging young people to stay in the industry and that is something we were very cognisant of when approaching our research and promotion.
We have seen great interest from younger generations in the work we have done, which is really encouraging for the future of agriculture in Ireland.
The competition has been a life-changing experience for us all. We had the opportunity to exhibit at the Ploughing for three days in 2023, visit the European Parliament and present our project to Irish MEPs and visit Michael O’Leary’s farm.
This is a unique schools programme and we have had a brilliant time over the course of the competition.
We would like to pay tribute to our supervising teacher, William Lynn, who has been with us from the get-go. William has been a tremendous support to us with our project and has put in a lot of time and energy into it alongside us.
We would also like to thank everyone in Mercy Secondary School Kilbeggan, our local community and the wider agricultural sector, who have given us so much support throughout the last two years.
We are so grateful to everyone who has helped us win this prestigious competition, it really is a great honour.”