Published on Wednesday14thSeptember2016
Junior Achievement Ireland Presents Children’s Budget 2017 to Minister Zappone
Minister Zappone pictured with students from St James’s Primary School, Basin Lane, Dublin 8
Junior Achievement Ireland, the leading nationwide non-profit educational organisation, has today marked the beginning of its 20th anniversary celebrations by presenting the ‘Children’s Budget 2017’ to Childrens Minister Katherine Zappone at Government Buildings.
Thirty six boys and girls aged 9-10, from St James’s Primary School, Basin Lane, Dublin 8 participated in a workshop where they would balance the ‘Children’s Budget’, using skills previously acquired from programmes Junior Achievement volunteers, from a wide range of supporting organisations, teach in their classrooms.
The goal at the end of the workshop was to fairly distribute the €6billion budget, €1billion for each department, wisely amongst the six departments; Department of Finance, Department of Tourism, Department of Agriculture, Department of Health, Department of Education and Department of Transport.
Child Moira Salang, aged 10 years, worked on the project as the ‘Minister for Children and Youth Affairs’ and explained how her department decided how to allocate the funding:
We were given €1bn to spend and our Junior Achievement Ireland leaders helped us understand the different areas in which we could choose to spend our money. We learned about all the different things to do with Children which the Minister has to look after. It was quite hard to decide how to spend the money in the best way. In the end, we chose things that we think would make a big difference and would help kids. One of our best ideas was to have a breakfast club where children can have breakfast in school for free. I hope Minister Zappone likes our ideas and uses one or two in the big budget in October.
Minister Zappone commented:
These children are our future and it is important that we nurture their young minds and remind them that there is no limit on what they can accomplish or should aspire to. This exercise has clearly utilised well the skills learned within the Junior Achievement programmes and helped the children apply the skills to a real-life scenario. I thank them very much for their bright ideas and out of the box thinking and will certainly be taking their contribution into consideration.
See the full press release here.