My TY

Jason O'Connorof Greenhills College, in Dublin, represented Ireland at the Youth Eco-Parliament, in Paris this term

I was introduced to Eco-Unesco, Ireland's environmental education and youth organisation, by one of my teachers, who asked if any of us would be interested in the Eco Youth Representatives programme, which teaches young people about the environment in the hope that they will pass on what they learn to their friends. Our group, which meets once a week after school, discusses many environmental topics.

As part of the programme, three of us were chosen to represent Ireland at the Youth Eco-Parliament, in Paris. Its main challenge was to jointly author an open letter to the European Parliament.

We communicated with students around Europe by e-mail and online, picking out the main points to use on the Youth Eco-Parliament website, which also had an online forum where participants could share interests.

Before we left for Paris we met Avril Doyle, the Irish MEP - and a director of Repak, the parliament's sponsor- who was very supportive.

At the airport I met Graham Murphy, a classmate from the Eco Youth Reps programme; Aoife Samblin of

St Dominic's College, who attended the programme with us; Elaine Nevin, national director of Eco-Unesco; Feidhlim O'Seasnain, our leader at Eco Youth Reps; and Alma Jordan of Repak.

The other people in our delegation, who were from Europe and Canada, were really nice. The representatives from France helped everyone to interact with a few warm-up games, including one where a sentence was written in English and every country translated one word into their language, to create a multilingual sentence.

The next day we began our discussions, which consisted of two-hour sessions with intervals for lunch. It was a long day, beginning at 9am and ending at 5.30pm. We had two group leaders, both of them French. Everyone had very good English but needed time to digest what was said.

On the third day we had discussions in the morning and a tour of Paris in the evening, taking a boat trip on the River Seine and a bus tour past the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower.

On the Thursday, at the Pro Europe Congress, each country's representative read out a section of their contribution to the open letter. As Ireland's, I was nervous - and I was also last, so I had to wait until everyone else had said their piece, which made it worse. Everyone said their pieces very well, though, and it was definitely a success.

If you would like to contribute to My TY, e-mail a 500-word article to gfaller@irish-times.ie. Don't forget to include your name, your school's name and a contact number