Page 12 - royal-times-17-18

Quarter final - Interview in Mullingar Park Finalists of The Irish Angus beef Schools Competition. Ms. Avril Murphy, Kelvin
McNally, Sophie O’Reilly, Barry Stratford, Rachel Alexander & Lloyd Hastings.

Irish Angus Beef Schools Competition

In October 2017 we (Sophie Reilly, Rachel Alexander, Barry restaurant. During this day we took over “That’s Farming” on
Stratford, Lloyd Hastings and Kelvin McNally) decided snapchat where nearly 7,000 people followed us through
to enter the Irish Angus Schools Beef Competition. This our day.
competition is run by the Irish Angus Producers Group, We also ran burger sales in the school, colouring
along with two meat processors, ABP Ireland and Kepak competitions in the National Schools and handed out
Group. The aim of this competition from the organisers leaflets in the local mart, all to raise awareness about the
point of view is to promote and raise awareness about the breed. We had Facebook and Snapchat accounts running
many benefits of Angus beef to farmers and consumers. The throughout the competition.
main benefit for us was to have fun, meet lots of inspirational
people and have the chance of winning 5 Angus calves. Suddenly the 14th March was upon us and we arrived in
Croke Park at 07:30 to set up our stand. Shortly after our
So, with these 5 calves in mind we entered the competition. stand was set up 5 or 6 judges from different companies and
The first round consisted of a 3-minute video. In this video organisations around Ireland interviewed us. They asked
we had to give an introduction about ourselves and who us questions about our promotions, our knowledge about
we are. We had so show our knowledge about the three the breed, our highlights and our achievements. It was an
partners in this competition, the Irish Angus Producers amazing day and one we will all remember.
Group, ABP Ireland and Kepak Group. We also had to talk
about how we planned to promote the breed to the farmers On Monday 18th of April we heard that we were having
and the consumer. another interview on the Wednesday as they couldn’t
decide on the winner, so for the next two days we crammed
Fortunately, we passed this round with flying colours, and as much information and promotional ideas into our head
succeeded to the next round, an interview. On Wednesday as possible.
17th January we went to our interview in Mullingar Park
Hotel. We were interviewed by representatives of the three Irish Angus Beef Schools Competition Team
competition partners along with an agricultural science
teacher. They asked us a range of questions to see what we
knew about Angus cattle such as their easy calving ability and
their fat marbling (leading to a juicier and more flavoursome
steak). They also asked us lots of questions about ourselves
to try and find out what sort of people we were.

Just over a week later we heard the good news that we were
one of 28 schools that had got through to the finals. The
finals of the Irish Angus Schools Beef Competition were held
on the 14th March 2018. However, between the good news
and the finals we had a lot of work to do.
We wanted to expand our knowledge even further for the
finals but also raise awareness about the breed. To do this we Semi-Finals Croke Park
organised a day to ABP Ireland in Clones Monaghan where
we learnt the whole process of what happens to a cow from
the slaughtering of it to the packaging. On the way home,
we stopped off at a farm that breeds Angus cattle. It was
great to see how the farmer feeds the cattle but also the
reasons that he breeds Angus.
To top the whole day off we met Neven Maguire at the school
where we told him about the project. One interesting thing
that he did tell us was that he solely uses Angus beef in his

12 The Royal Times 2017-2018