Over the course of the past weeks and months I have been doing a lot of horse riding in preparation for the RDS qualifiers. I have three horses that I want to qualify for Dublin with 1 horse already in. At these qualifiers the coaches for the Irish Junior Team (under 18) selected 10 combinations to attend a training in Coilog the next Sunday. The first round of this trial stood at about 1m35-1m40 which was still bit of a test. After the first round they raised the fences to 1m45 which was easily the biggest course I'd ever jumped. Having been the only double clear at the trial I was selected to go to the nations cup shows in Opglabeek and Hagen. I was truly delighted just to able to go to these shows but to be able to jump the nations cup at these shows is something special. I leave next Monday on the boat to Wales and then drive all the way across England to dover where will stable for the night. We will get morning boat to Calais and then its a 5 hour drive up to the show in Belgium. After this show we will drive to Germany where we will stable for the week in Carol Hanley's yard, this is one of the most renowned Irish yards worldwide. After this its another 4 hours up to the Hagen. I am truly looking forward to this experience away and hopefully I will get a few good results as well. My Goal for this year is to compete at the european championships in July. This year I was lucky enough to be part of the senior cup team. My season started late as I broke my finger in the first training session of the year and I went away to France and Switzerland for three weeks. When I came back I was thrown in at the deep end starting a match against our local rivals with very little time to get myself into shape or even learn the calls. When my brother came back from injury I was left sitting on the bench and had to battle very hard to get myself back in the team. I played in the closing matches of the league and the quarter and semi finals. We faced last years champions in the semi finals and they proved too strong for us beating us quiet convincingly. We had to regroup after this disappointing result leading into the cup campaign. We prepared well for the cup and trained hard. Our cup campaign was put to a firm halt when we lost to CBC in the first round. This was a game we truly should have won and hadn't it had been for a few bad decisions by the referee and some miss opportunity we mightn't have put ourselves in the position of losing by 1 point in the last minute of the game. All in all I had a very enjoyable years rugby but I think we will look to have a much more successful year next year. I did my mini company with Mark Fagan. We did it through our Accounting and Economics classes which we both share. We decided that our idea would be to make crepes and sell them at the Christmas Bazaar. We would make nutella crepes and sell them with various toppings. We had everything sorted and spent loads of time preparing batter and buying ingredients/toppings. However on the night of the bazaar we were not allowed to go through with our mini company due to health and safety purposes. This was greatly disappointing as we had brought everything in and even bought two crepe cookers but also because we were using electric crepe makers which meant they caused no health hazard at all. Our proceeds would have gone to the Bazaar fund which goes to a number of local charities so we were very unhappy to not go through with our mini company. Last Monday the 11th of May I had the opportunity to do work experience in Ernest and Young's. EY is a top accountancy firm but they also provide different services for their clients an example of this is tax, advisory and assurance. EY's offices are on Harcourt street in Dublin and I got the bus in every day to Lessen street and walked down to the offices from there. In truth this was disappointing week as I didn't learn a lot about how the firm works and spent most of my time either organising files or typing in tax laws and rates of corporate tax. Having said that I learned a lot about the work that interns and work placements do. I had lunch every day with a few of the interns and they were telling me that they started in September and they were only starting to do proper work the last month. They also brought me for lunch in dycey's one of the day's which was cool. I was in corporate tax mainly and spent a day in tax knowledge. All in all I thought this was a very worthwhile experience as I mightened have learned an awful lot about the company but I learned lots about work in the real world and what a day job from 9-5 is like and if I would be suited to that.
This year I had Ms Carrigy for most of the year but I moved to Ms Finanes class as I changed other options classes. In Ms Carrigy's class we mainly concentrated on grammar, whereas in Ms Finanes class we mainly concentrated on the tenses particularly the past. We watched extra which is a french comedy and it helped me to increase my vocabulary as it had English subtitles and was spoken in French. My favorite part of french class was we got to play quiz-let which is an online vocabulary game. Myself and 3 other student held a quiz for the 1st year students before Christmas. I feel like I learned loads this year because of the constant learning of vocab but also because if my great teachers. On the a member of Dun Laoghaire's Garda Drug Unit came in and gave the year a very informative lecture on the work done by our local drugs' squads, the Gardaí in general and his personal experiences.
His points varied from the effects of different drugs to how these drugs are manufactured and distributed to what the Gardaí are doing about it. After the week long mid-term break, we returned to school on the 22nd of February and were put straight on a bus off to Louth where we would stay for the next five days in Carlingford Adventure Centre. I was very excited about what the week would bring but i didn't know what to expect. When we arrived we were put into two groups for the week and set our rooms. I was in a room with 8 lads. We were woken by the sound of loud music followed by two extremely loud voices from the corridor. Breakfast was at 8 and the outdoor activities started at 9. We completed a vast majority of different activities from zorbing to high robes to Canadian canoeing. My favourite activity of the week was the zip lining through the forest. This was my favourite week of TY so far and i really enjoyed the whole experience.
On Monday the 11th April I was lucky enough to be have the opportunity to do some work experience in Michael Ryan’s yard. He is an international event rider who has competed at the top level of eventing for the past decade and has competed at the Olympic games in London 2012. I set off on the 6 o’clock bus to Dublin, and then I took two more buses to Eventually reach Bandon in West Cork 7 hours later. I was wrecked upon arrival but I had no time to rest getting straight into it riding 3 horses in the afternoon.
One of them being the horse that Michael rode in badminton last week finishing second best of the Irish and it was a privilege to be able to sit on horse with so much ability. After feeding the horses at 5 o’clock I set off for Bandon town to buy food for the week. One of the hardest things to get use to for the whole week was cooking all my own meals. The week was tough but a great experience and I learnt a lot. One thing I could never do every day is get up at 6;15 every morning and have a quick breakfast and be out to work at 6;30. Michael and Ballylynch Adventure below competing in Badminton last week |