Transition Year students can win a week's work placement in The Irish Times. Send us your thoughts (200 words maximum) on a media-related topic - if your submission is published, the placement is yours.
Brian Kelly, Oatlands College, Stillorgan, Dublin
TV3 WILL BE a success. Not only will it be a success, it will gain more than the 6 per cent of the viewing public it is aiming for.
Why? Well, for one, it is a younger station with new ideas which will appeal to people because they are fed up watching the rubbish on RTE 1, Network 2 and Sky. TV3 has also bought the rights to show the Republic of Ireland's away matches in the European Championships, which will obviously mean people tuning in.
Forty-five per cent of TV3 is owned by CanWest, which is the biggest purchaser of Hollywood products outside the US - which means TV3 will get new films on to its screens before the other stations do. This means people will watch TV3 and realise it is worth watching.
TV3 has its down sides. CanWest is not Irish, which means some of the profits of the company will be leaving this country.
The positive side of TV3 far outweighs the negative, so I for one am all for TV3 and open competition.
Yvonne McNulty, John the Baptist Community School, Hospital, Co Limerick
Dancing At Lughnasa is being advertised with a little help from Maeve Binchy. She is quoted as opining that the Mundy sisters would rule the world if they were living today. This outrageous claim should not be allowed to go unchallenged.
Brian Friel's play, set in Donegal, tells the story of five sisters living in the Thirties. Kate, the eldest and educated one, allows herself to be bullied by the parish priest and refuses to fight back when she is unfairly dismissed from her post as a primary teacher. Aggie is unable to get a job in the knitting factory and so moves to London and lives the life of a downand-out. Chris, the pretty one, is taken in by a smooth-talking salesman from Wales. Maggie is hardly world-conquering material and Rose, let's face it, is an imbecile. If the Mundy women were alive today, they would be on the dole, or in care, or at best struggling to survive.
