Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern travelled to Ballymena in north Antrim yesterday to launch the Michael McIlveen Scholarship, in memory of the Catholic teenager who was fatally assaulted in the town in May last year.
Mr Ahern attended St Patrick's College where Michael McIlveen went to school to announce that he was providing €80,000 to help fund the scholarship.
Teachers and students from nine Catholic and Protestant schools in the area will participate in the cross-community reconciliation project under the umbrella Ballymena Learning Together initiative, which encourages young people to address their own prejudices.
The murder of Michael McIlveen, aged just 15, caused shock and outrage. He was brutally beaten by a gang in a car park in Ballymena. Several youths have been charged in connection with the killing.
The money will be used to provide a grant to a student from each of the nine schools. The programme will run for five years, said Mr Ahern.
"Ballymena Learning Together is an excellent example of an organisation which is engaging in serious efforts to help Northern Ireland move away from division and sectarianism," he added.
He said the work of Ballymena Learning Together demonstrates the initiative shown by individuals and organisations in the North to build a better future.
"They act as an inspiration to us all. I suppose it is a catchphrase that young people are the future, but they are the future because young people now do not remember all the awful incidents we had - they don't remember Enniskillen, they don't remember the Omagh bombing, the Loughinisland shootings and all those terrible incidents.
"As one person said to me earlier this morning, we grow up in a way that perhaps we are bigoted and we do not realise we are bigoted. People need to break out of that and through projects like this with young people from schools learning at the very bottom they will realise there is a different life, particularly in the multi-ethnic society we have now."
