Our day started off early because we had to meet at the school for 8:15am and our bus was supposed to come at 8:30am. The build up was great because we were all so excited for the tournament. We were waiting for about 20 minutes at the gates of the school, but it turned out that the bus driver went to St. Paul’s N.S. in Navan so we had to go in the teachers’ cars instead! It took us about 35 minutes to get to Gormanston College. We were rushed to get changed and warm up because we were playing in the first match against Longford. It took us a moment to get into the match as best as we could but we played our best in the second half and our work payed off because the final score was 10-0 to us. At this point we were two players down as Katie O’Brien had an injury from the previous weekend and Ellie O’Leary had been sick at the tournament. We had a while to wait for our next match which was against West Meath and the score was 9-1. We played really well and we worked as a team. We had about 2 hours to wait until our next match. This match was against Wexford and we had a big improvement as the score was 13-0. This result meant that we were into the final! The final was against St. Olaf’s from Dublin. The build up to the match was great. We were all making sure we had our starting team ready. Our starting line up was Emma Mulvaney in goals, Eliza Prior at the back, Lauren Richardson
on the left wing, Maya Moran on the right wing and Sofia Sarapaite was up front. All of the girls had a part to do in the match and we worked together as best as we could. We were under a bit of pressure but we continued to score four goals but unfortunately St. Olaf’s scored 2. The second half started and we played really well. We knew that this would determine if we could go to the University of Limerick for the All Ireland Finals or not. From the top, we scored a goal straight away to make it 5-2. St. Olaf’s had scored another two after that but we all played really well for the rest of the match and scored two more goals to make the final score 7-4. We were so happy when the whistle blew because we knew we made it to the All Ireland Finals! We had a great day and are looking forward and training hard for Limerick.

Written by Emma Mulvaney and Lauren Richardson

On the 29th of February, our school celebrated Odd Socks Day to help raise money for Down Syndrome Ireland. On that day, all of the students and teachers wore odd socks and were encouraged to bring in 2 euro each as a donation. On Odd Socks Day, our school managed to successfully raise a total of €937.76! Thanks to all of the students and teachers in our school, we were able to help support Down Syndrome Ireland and raise a lot of money.
Written by Emma Flood, 5^th Class

On Odds Socks Day everyone brought in two euro to raise money for Down Syndrome Ireland. Everyone wore Odd Socks to school. Down Syndrome Ireland offers support and services to people with Down Syndrome and their families throughout Ireland. In St. Paul’s we raised €934.76.
Written by Adam Sherlock, 5^th Class   

The end of 2023 was a very busy year for the St. Paul’s Garden and our Garden Committee!

Following on from the success of our Hazel tree planting to mark Tree Day, we planted our very own orchard right here in the grounds of St. Paul’s! We planted 5 fruits trees – 3 apple trees, 1 pear tree and 1 plum tree. These fruit trees were kindly donated to us by DC’s for Bees Orchards in the Community Project. We are very much looking forward to making many visits to the orchard and watching the trees grow and bear fruit for many years to come.

Many thanks to our Garden Committee for promoting our new orchard across the school and encouraging our classes to go out to visit it!

Safer Internet Day took place recently on the 6th February. Our IT committee were working very hard that day to promote internet safety in our school. They visited classrooms to share their top Internet Safety tips and produced the wonderful display that you can see in the photo above. Well done to everyone involved.

Congratulations to our Junior and Senior Quiz Teams who had a successful night recently at the Credit Union Quiz in Ashbourne. Have a read of their reports below…

The night started off by getting to the Ashbourne House Hotel at 6.45pm as the quiz was starting at 7 O’ clock. Firstly I met up with my team which consisted of me, Victor, Liam and Riley. The quiz had 10 rounds of six questions for the junior teams and 12 rounds of 6 questions for the senior teams. Our junior team consisted of Nicholas, Evan, Kalan and Siúan. The first three or four rounds were quite easy with questions like ‘What is the capital of England’? However, midway through round five it started to get hard. Thankfully after round five we had a break and we got a bar of chocolate, a drink and a bag of crisps. After the break we got straight back into it with round 6 as the questions were really hard. After a few more rounds we started to get nervous. When we answered the last question in round 12 we knew that’s all we could do. But then we found out we have to go to a tie breaker with two other schools. When we finished the round they announced that Saint Paul`s Ratoath were first place. We were over the moon! We walked up to receive our trophy and an envelope with 25 euro in it. Our junior team also had done really well placing 3rd place.
Written by Adam Walsh, 6th Class 

Just before seven o’clock on Friday the 26th of January I arrived at the Ashbourne House Hotel for the Credit Union Quiz. I was the first one there. The members of the junior team were Kalan, Evan and Siuán and the members of the senior team were Victor, Adam, Liam and Rylee. The first few questions were really easy. Then they started getting pretty hard. Finally the break came. After the break the questions were really hard. The senior teams had to go to a tiebreaker. The junior team came 3rd place with 41 points. The senior team won with 54 points. I had great fun.
Written by Nicholas Clarke, 4th Class