Blog 3 – Students and Staff of Marino College, Dublin 3

The following blog posts have been written by the Students and Staff of Marino College, Dublin 3. They will share the story of Marino College’s ‘Creative Minds Festival of Art and Culture’. Find out all about their journey from initial ideas to realising their dream of arranging an Arts and Culture Festival for the community, by the community.

Marino College is a small City of Dublin ETB school. They are plurilingual (37 languages!), non-denominational and DEIS. The schools catchment area is a vibrant and rapidly evolving multicultural part of Dublin North East Inner City.

Under the leadership of Irish teacher Joan Lyne (now also a Teacher Creative Associate with the Arts Council), in 2022 Marino College became a Creative School.

In 2023 Marino College, together with various local schools and organisations joined a Creative Clusters scheme. The project is one of the recipients of the 2024 Arts in Education Portal Documentation Award read the announcement here.

We’re delighted to share the third blog in the series from the students and staff of Marino College, Dublin 3. In this post, staff and students reflect on collaboration in the planning and organising of their Creative Minds Festival of Arts and Culture, Marino 100: Back to the Future, and talk about some of the artists, groups and organisations they worked with.

Turning the idea of our Creative Minds Festival into reality took a lot of engagement, involvement and collaboration with a wide variety of groups in our community. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at some of the people organisations we partnered with and how our collaboration enhanced the scope and ambition of what we were able to achieve.

The first, and key, partnership that led to the Festival’s success were having our Artist in Residence, Heather Gray, to work with. Heather initially came to the school as a Creative Practitioner in the pilot stages of the Arts Council’s Creative Schools Programme. She’s the creative force behind the project, guiding students, staff and community members in making and doing.

Irish teacher Joan Lyne, who first dreamt up the Festival Parade, is a constant source of great ideas and problem solving, a driving force of creativity in the school, who now coordinates the TY Creative Schools class. Our Art, Music, Home Ec., SEN and Guidance departments have collaborated extensively with visiting artists and craftspeople to facilitate opportunities for learning and fun for students. Ms French and Ms Connor’s organisational and communication skills are world class, and we’re lucky to have buy-in from all our enthusiastic and supportive staff in Marino College: all members of staff were involved in some capacity. Special mention to our Special Needs Assistants, Teresa, the two Helens, Mary, Grainne, Aisling and Tamlyn too – their indefatigable good humour and incredible way with our students made planning and organisation so much easier.

School Management, our former Principal Mary McAteer (retired) and current Principal Lisa Reid, and Deputy Principal Grainne Cullen, understood the added value creativity outside of (but linked to) the classroom brings to the school, and support Heather’s working with us in Art Club every Wednesday afternoon. Their buy-in as key stakeholders was essential, as was the support of our Board of Management. The Chair of our Board, Deputy-Lord Mayor of Dublin and local City Councillor Donna Cooney, who also helps arrange the local Welcome Fairview initiative for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, was very supportive and joined us on the day, alongside the then Deputy-Lord Mayor Cllr. Deirdre Heney.

The Welcome Fairview Group worked on creating ceramic tableware with students and parents that we used to share food from different cultures at our Global Feast and BBQ. The BBQ couldn’t have happened without the support of Swan Youth Service on Dunne Street, supportive champions of young people in our area.

We were also lucky to be accepted, along with St. Vincent’s Girl’s National School, Mount Carmel School and St. Joseph’s CBS Fairview, in our application to become a Creative Cluster, an initiative of the Department of Education. This collaboration saw secondary students work with primary pupils in making props and costumes and artists ran workshop sessions in each of the schools. For the 2025 Parade, Heather’s already run workshops in the JCSP Library in Mount Carmel making The Morrigan puppets, which the Mount Carmel students will have in this year’s parade, along with students from all the other schools.

We received generous funding from The European Cultural Foundation’s Europe Challenge Project, which allowed us to upscale and extent the festival in year two. This project saw us work in close collaboration with the Marino Resident’s Association, and in particular their Marino 100 Committee, who coordinated the local celebrations of the area’s centenary. Our school is also extremely fortunate to have one of only 30 State-funded school libraries in the country, under the Junior Cert. Schools Programme Demonstration Library Project, allowing us to place cross-curricular teaching and learning at the heart of all of our collaborations and to host workshops and sessions in the library, linking to the library’s print and digital stock.

Fairview’s Viva School of Dance taught students to dance to the tune most associated with our area, the famous Marino Waltz, through workshops in school and with local residents. RTE Junior’s Senior Producer, Nicky Coghlan, came along on the day of the Parade and recorded a podcast with students, and Irish Times photographers took fantastic shots of the Festival and Parade too, featuring in both print and digital editions of the paper.

As part of the festivities, under the theme of Diversity and Biodiversity, we worked with Easy Treesie to plant native trees in the area, hiding a forest in the city. We worked with Dublin City Council Parks and planted trees in Fairview Park as well as in the grounds of St. Joseph’s CBS and at the Mater Step-Down Unit on Phlipsburg Avenue.

Students from Marino College in Dublin planting trees with Easy Treesie as part of the Creative Minds Festival

Our goals to challenge anti-immigrant sentiment were informed and supported by AkiDwA, Black & Irish and East Wall Here for All, alongside Mud Island Community Garden. On the morning of the Festival last year, we welcomed the assessment team from Schools of Sanctuary, who met with students and staff and awarded us our School of Sanctuary status.

Roisin Lonergan, Creative Director of the Five Lamps Arts Festival, has been a constant support, sharing her extensive skills, knowledge and contacts with us. Dublin Port Company were also very generous in their support. Many visiting artists and craftspeople enhanced the skillsets that enabled our making and doing, including Samba drummers William Ribeiro and Simeon Smith, fibre artists Sinead Lynch and Helen Gaughan and artist Maddy Schmidt, to name just a few! Local artist Steven Doody can turn his hand to anything and is always reliable for help and advice.

Closing roads for the Parade required collaboration with An Garda Síochána, whose community liaison officer in Clontarf Station couldn’t have been more helpful and helped to coordinate stewards on the day. Dublin Bus allowed us hold up the 123 bus route, and Dublin City Council Arts Office, and the City Council more widely, provided great supports, funding, advice and encouragement. We had to create a detailed Event Plan and Risk Assessment to most of these organisations. We also had to create a detailed plan showing who needed to be where, when, doing what, with an assigned role for everyone in the school and plenty more people besides!

Marino College Festival organisation – A designated role and an individualised schedule for everyone in the building!

St. Vincent’s Infants School on Griffith Avenue and St. Vincent de Paul School North Strand welcomed Marino students into their classrooms to run creative prop- and costume- making workshops with their pupils. Cathal Brugha Further Education and Training College, North Strand Campus, were generous in allowing us to use their facilities for creativity and for storage. Music Generation’s Peter O’Toole supported the music department, and Irish teacher Niamh Murray coordinated choreography. Local Businesses proudly promoted the festivities – literally all of the community were involved!

The many groups and organisations who supported Marino College’s Creative Minds Festival

Collaboration across our community was key to the project’s success – there are so many great organisations out there working to achieve the same goals, so it’s great to discover one another and find opportunities to work together to build on our community connections. We’re gearing up for this year’s festival, with the theme of ‘Global Myths, Local Legends’, and look forward to telling you all about it in our next blog post!