Irish Students to compete in Global Chinese Speaking Competition

Caoileann Ní Cheallaigh, a leaving cert student from Coláiste Íosagáin in Dublin and Tiernan Murphy a transition year student from Midleton College in Cork will this week travel to China to represent Ireland at the Global Chinese Speaking Competition. Both students, who are studying Chinese at the Confucius Institutes in UCD and UCC respectively, topped the Irish round of the world-wide competition and won the opportunity to compete with over 120 participants from all over the globe in the final to be held in Kunming in the South of China.

The event will take place over a two week period and will include several individual performances and team activities. Caoileann and Tiernan have been preparing intensively with support from tutors from the Conficius Institutes and are determined to do Ireland proud in the competition.

Tiernan learnt Chinese while living in China from 2007 to 2012 and achieved notoriety when he secured a top five place in the All China Storytelling Competition in 2010, the first non-Asian to reach that level. Caoileann developed her love for Chinese when she studied in Beijing during her transition year in 2014 where she won a scholarship for follow-on Chinese studies.