Maeve Binchy, Roddy Doyle and Hugo Hamilton, among a group of writers, have been helping students to voice their concerns about human-rights abuses. Anna Carey reports
At one end of a large, echoing school hall, a bunch of transition-year students at Wesley College in Dublin are hurling abuse at each other. "Pack of stuck-up bitches," sneers one. "Scumbags," snaps another. Their parents needn't worry that their children are turning into obnoxious bigots. The teenagers are rehearsing a new play by Hugo Hamilton, which they will be performing on Tuesday at the launch of Voice Our Concern, an education project run by Amnesty International.
Hamilton began to write the play two years ago, after meeting a group of Wesley students who were then in transition year. "Amnesty approached me and Roddy Doyle about doing something for schools, and we came up with the idea of sending writers out to schools," says Maeve Binchy. "The writers would talk to the children and let them choose the issues - about inequalities and human rights and the things they worried about. Then the writers would go and write plays that could be done not just by the children they'd been talking to, but in other schools all over the country."
That was the beginning of Voice Our Concern, which uses creative activity to highlight human-rights issues in schools. "It engages young people who mightn't be engaged by reading a book on human rights," says Karen O'Reilly of Amnesty. "They're not just sitting in a classroom being taught; they're expressing their own concerns through a creative medium. And it allows people to reach a wider audience; we can screen films, put on their plays." The plays have now been gathered in a workbook, which will make the programme accessible to all students, not just the ones lucky enough to be visited.
Last year the focus was on poetry, with writers such as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill visiting schools and working with students. This year, short-film makers are inspiring students to make their own movies. Schools that take part in the project in the future may find themselves exploring human rights through visual art, non-fiction writing and even dance.
The plays look at everything from race relations in an increasingly multicultural Ireland to class tension in Dublin. Hugo Hamilton "tried to talk about globalisation and immigration to Ireland", and he says he "got something out of them", but the conversation really got going when the issue of class was raised. "I was asking when they [ the students] felt threatened, and they said that they sometimes felt threatened when they were categorised and targeted as 'rich kids'. And then somebody dropped the word 'knacker'. I don't want to accuse them all of being rich kids, but that's what I found interesting - more so than other global issues, this concerned them. So I felt that was the way to go."
The result was the provocatively titled Knackers, in which two groups of teenagers are forced to confront class stereotypes when middle-class Tara leaves her mobile phone in a cafe, where it is picked up by working-class Maurice.
"It wasn't that long ago since I was in school, and I knew what it's like to be preached at," says Hamilton. "So it was important to write a play where issues of discrimination would slip into the text rather than being pointed out in a heavy-handed way. I thought the issues being thrown up by the lost mobile would connect with them."
Hamilton left plenty of room for the students to improvise and contribute to the play. "I wanted them to put their own observations in, so I left instructions in the play so they could put their own bad language in," he says. "I think it would be great if they got their own prejudices out, so they can hear how bad it is."
This year's Wesley transition-year students are now putting together a production of Knackers under the guidance of English teacher Niall MacMonagle. They're all enjoying the experience, and they agree that the play has made them think about the issues it explores. In fact, the response from participating schools has been overwhelmingly positive.
Two schools in Swords, Co Dublin, that took part in the first year of the programme went on to collaborate with another local school in what became a sort of human-rights festival, at which they put on plays they had worked on with Maeve Binchy and Peter Sheridan, as well as exhibiting poetry and visual art projects. Binchy isn't surprised. "I think that when I visited the school, the students thought it was a free day in the beginning," she says. "But it was like a boulder going down a hill. Once some of the students started talking, they all got going, they all got excited about it, and it turned into a big production."
Teachers and students can find out about Voice Our Concern by contacting Karen O'Reilly at Amnesty International, 01-6776361 ext 230, e-mail voc@amnesty.ie, www.voiceourconcern.org