Around 150 second-level students from Cork, Dublin, Meath, Down and Antrim gathered in Priory College, a secondary school in Hollywood, outside Belfast, yesterday to introduce the Irish version of a project which has crossed the world from California to Kazakhstan.
"Project Citizen" - or "Civic Link", as it is known in Ireland - is the brainchild of Mr Charles Quigley, director of the California-based Centre for Civic Education. His centre has been running programmes on citizenship, law and democratic decision-making for American schoolchildren since the 1960s; 2.7 million students now take its courses every year.
In the early 1990s he thought up the "Project Citizen" programme. This involves second-level students exploring local community problems, choosing one to which they believe they can find a solution; researching and presenting that solution; and then incorporating it into an action plan which can be used to lobby legislators and officials.
The US Education Secretary, Mr Richard Riley, pointed to students in a small town in Alabama who had carried out a comparative study of fire services in their region and used it to persuade the local council to upgrade the local fire service from part- to full-time; a town in Texas where they had pressured councillors into putting in a footpath and traffic lights outside their school; and a third in Colorado where they had successfully lobbied local political and church leaders to open a shelter for homeless teenagers.
In recent years the programme has been exported to Bosnia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Poland and Russia. The most comprehensive overseas version is in Bosnia, where nearly 50,000 students and 2,200 teachers are involved. In once war-torn towns such as Gorazde and Mostar, schoolchildren are taking action on cleaning the streets of war debris and getting park benches for the elderly.
Now "Project Citizen" has come to Ireland. Yesterday students from St Peter's College in Dunboyne, Co Meath and Dundonald High School in east Belfast worked together to come up with five problems they felt were particularly pressing in their areas: litter, vandalism and robberies, violence, suicide, and health problems caused by alcohol, drugs and HIV.
Paul Brennan (14) from Dunboyne said students north and south had "far more in common than we ever disagree on - love of life, music, the opposite sex and having fun" - and were not "given credit for our ability to inspire and energise those around us".
Twenty-six second-level schools and youth groups on both sides of the Border will be involved in the programme's first year, with another 46 joining in years two and three.
Co-operation Ireland, the cross-Border body which is running the initiative, hopes that eventually its study materials will be incorporated in citizenship courses throughout the island.
It was launched yesterday by Mr Riley - whose ancestors came from Cavan - the Minister for Education and Science, Mr Martin, and the North's Minister for Education, Mr John McFall.
Mr Riley said the kind of "people-to-people relationships" involved in the programme were doubly meaningful to teenagers because they were based on "giving people a chance to be friends with each other and at the same time to look at the needs of their community".
Mr Martin agreed. As someone from a strong nationalist background, he had become "absolutely convinced" from meeting Northerners as "human beings" that "the future of this island is about young people meeting each other without any political context - just meeting as young people".
The US Department of Education is putting the equivalent of $660,000 (£440,000) per year into the programme - including teacher training and exchanges. The Department of Education in Dublin is contributing another £300,000. The Department of Education in Northern Ireland has endorsed the initiative.