School’s hens hatch love for nature among students

Four happy red hens live in a chicken coop on the grounds of Gaelscoil an Choillín in Mullingar.

The hens, who have been resident there since last summer, are a big hit with pupils from all classes in the school.

Thomas Hora, Thomas Britton-Keena and Fiachra Scally took the Westmeath Examiner out to see the hens in their comfortable living quarters.

“The teachers feed them,” says Thomas Hora, revealing that they eat special chicken food and that they lay eggs every day.

Fiachra is comfortable around them, as while his family don’t have hens, his cousins do, and he sometimes visits those cousins.

Thomas Britton-Keena is also comfortable with them – but admits that becoming familiar with poultry hasn’t fired him up with an appetite for farming: it’s athletics rather than agriculture that interests him.

Ciara Sheerin and Fionnuala Heape both have hens at home, but despite growing up with hens, Fionnuala confesses that while she likes them, she also finds them a bit frightening.

Ciara finds them fun, and says that many of the school’s pupils come out often to see that the hens are OK.

“At the start, they didn’t really come over to us, because they would be scared, but now they’d come over,” she says.

Deputy principal, Trína Ní Nualláin, reveals that initially, the ambition was that the hens should be completely free-range – but birds know no boundaries, and so they started coming in to the school building when the doors were open, or even out on the road beside the school, so they had to put up an enclosure in the end.

“They started becoming a bit cheeky!” she laughs.

The hens aren’t the only food-production project in the school: “We had Paddy Madden from ‘Heritage in Schools’ visiting us here recently, and we had a fantastic day long workshop with him and we’ve planted all our pea seeds, and they’re all in the classrooms, and we’re putting them out into our boxes now in coming weeks.

“We’re also working closely with Tidy Towns. They’re visiting us on a regular basis, and we’re continuing with our litter picking, and we’re on our second flag, which is the Water Flag.”