Nenagh College students visit Toastmasters
The latest meeting of Nenagh Toastmasters club for the 2019-2020 season was held on Tuesday, February 4th, in the Abbey Court Hotel with a great attendance, anticipating the arrival and speeches from Transition Year students in Nenagh College.
And they were not to be disappointed. The meeting began a welcome from our President, Sean Butler, and as usual he offered some words of wisdom before handing over control of the meeting to the Toastmaster for the night, John Leinster.
John also welcomed the attendance at the meeting and in particular the two TY students, Emma Freeman and Sadhbh Clancy and their respective mothers, and then he asked the various members who were performing roles to explain what they had to do for the meeting.
Once those formalities were concluded, John welcomed the first speaker, Willie Grace, who delivered a very interesting speech entitled 'Looking at the stars'. Willie was then followed by the first of the TY students, Emma Freeman, who kept us enthralled for 15 minutes about Asperger’s and how she came to manage her diagnosis early in her teens. The crowd responded warmly to her honesty, her delivery and acknowledged how well she met the challenge of standing up to talk in front of a room full of strangers to deliver such a speech. The meeting responded with warm applause and her mother was bursting with pride.
We wondered if the next TY student could match that but we needn’t have worried as Sadhbh Clancy delivered a tour de force in her speech about Harry Potter, making a grizzled old writer such as myself appreciate what the Harry Potter phenomenon was all about. And Sadhbh did this in a calm, eloquent and timely way, and the audience responded as enthusiastically to her speech. And needless to say, her mother, Noelle Clancy, was also bursting with pride.
All speeches were then evaluated in turn respectively by John Spillane, Willie Grace and Siobhan O’Leary, and positive, helpful feedback was dispensed in a kind and supportive manner. In particular, Willie and Siobhan praised the two TY students and their classmates in Nenagh College for participating in the Youth Leadership training delivered in the schools in Nenagh by Nenagh Toastmasters and said that they received more from seeing the students do what they had just done than they gave to the students.
Following the 20-minute break for refreshments and chat, Tony Spain challenged the meeting with interesting topics on subjects that no members had any prior knowledge of (guests are never asked to speak, but are free to add on to a topic, if they feel strongly about it).
The meeting was evaluated by the General evaluator, Helen Spillane and another successful meeting was concluded. Our next meeting is on Tuesday, February 18th, so please come along for 8.15pm in the Abbey Court Hotel for an entertaining night and meet new friends and learn something as well. Guests are always welcome. Looking forward to seeing you there.