Westmeath student features in nationwide special on project my adopted soldier
Westmeath student features in Nationwide special on project ‘My Adopted Soldier’
Monday November 9 and Wednesday 11, 7pm, RTÉ1
RTÉ Nationwide broadcasts two special programmes this November focusing on a project involving a secondary school student from every county in Ireland paying tribute to a soldier from that county who died in World War I.
Guest presenter Eileen Magnier, RTÉ’s North West Correspondent, and cameraman Brian McVeigh followed the students as they researched their soldiers’ stories and in some cases found living relatives.
They uncovered some intriguing and tragic cases before travelling as a group to the Somme to get an insight into what their soldiers had gone through and to pay their respects at their graves.
In many cases it’s believed this was the first time that the particular soldier’s story had been told and his grave visited.
Bailey Reid-Patchell, a student at Mullingar Community College, representing Westmeath, investigated the story of Private Michael Dunne from Mullingar, and with the help of Liz Cunningham, a grand-niece of Private Dunne, and the staff of the local library, he pieced together the story of a family deeply affected by the war.
He described it as a great honour to represent Westmeath and the Dunne family on a journey which had become deeply personal to him and to all of the other students.
The project is a unique one according to its creator, history teacher Gerry Moore from Glenties in County Donegal. Never before has a group of young people representing each of the 32 counties paid such a tribute to Irish men who lost their lives in WWI.
The first Nationwide programme meets some of the students as they begin the searches, and those working on a website where all research is uploaded – myadoptedsoldier.com.
The lasting legacy of the project is a website telling the story of the individual soldiers as researched by the students and it is planned to expand the database in the future making it a valuable resource for schools and anyone with an interest in the involvement of Irish people in World War I.
In the second programme, Nationwide travelled to the Somme with the students for what an emotional experience as they get a sense of what life was like in the trenches and pay their respects to their adopted soldiers and also to the thousands of soldiers who have no known graves.
Before the students departed on their trip they visited Áras an Uachtaráin, where President Michael D Higgins congratulated them on helping to “write these soldiers back into Irish history”.
The trip had a huge impact on the students and on Gerry Moore, who said that in his 25 years at a teacher, he had never experienced such an emotional roller-coaster.
The two programmes are being broadcast in the lead-up to and on Remembrance Day, November 11, this year.