UCD Junior Schools’ Debate
Last night was the first night of the UCD Junior Schools Debate. Our team consisted of Alex Hinde and Tyrone Shi (Second Form), as well as Caleb Swanepoel and Caroline Hager (Third Form). All did well and Tyrone and Alex were placed second in the debate in their room.
Tyrone Shi writes:
The first round of UCD Junior Schools Debating Competition took place last night in the Newman building. In all, there are 192 teams entering the competition, making it the biggest Junior competition in Leinster. I found it was a great experience and I learned a lot from it. The event was quite challenging but I still found it quite fun and I will definitely participate again. Our motion was ‘that this house would abolish trial by jury’ and Alex Hinde and I were opposing this.
I’ll start off at the second when the first speaker started her speech: she spoke with great confidence and extreme speed. It was overall a great speech and made me quite nervous.
The 2ndand 4thspeakers in our round were amazing and it wasn’t a surprise that they came in first place.
As I was the first speaker out of our team I went up to the podium and took out my speech. I started off by making everyone laugh with my introduction and the rest went quite well. Alex was the eighth speaker and he was disappointed other debaters did not take all of his points of order as he had quite a few!
In the end we achieved an amazing second place and came home with a proud result. The competition continues next week.
