Bernie Carroll brings 1,500 students over to Ireland every year to learn English, and her business – Student Programmes Ireland Ltd – was a finalist at this year’s National Enterprise Awards. This enterprise, which is supported by the Local Enterprise Office (LEO) Limerick, was set up by Bernie and her husband, Joe, in 2009.

Student Programmes Ireland Ltd places students with host families mainly in rural areas in Munster, though it has also placed some students in Co Mayo and in the Carlow/Kilkenny area. The company provides education programmes for European students who want to improve their English language learning skills by developing tailor-made programmes to suit the needs of each individual student.

Bernie was chairperson of Ballyhoura Development from 2002 to 2005.

“When I was doing that, Ballyhoura was bringing students in during the summer into a little village called Kilfinane in Co Limerick and they were looking for somebody to take over that business. I had been working in Golden Vale in Charleville for 24 years and then it was taken over by Kerry Co-op, so I decided I was going to do something or work for myself. I decided okay, this is an opportunity and I could see great potential in it.”

Bernie brings in students from Europe – generally from Spain, France, Germany and Italy. Some students come for two- to four-week periods during the summer, while others come for a term, such as September to Christmas, and then some students come for a full school year. Host families are paid for hosting the students.

“A lot of families would say to me that it pays for their own child in college – they’ve a spare room and they’re getting paid to host a student. We’ve brilliant host families and a lot of them have been hosting for a good number of years. However, with the nature of the business, you have to keep getting in the families all the time, because their children are getting older and maybe there’s no children then in the house, so they’re not suitable to host anymore.”

Bernie explains they’re always looking for new families and that interested readers should get in touch.

She gets a lot of satisfaction from her business.

“Many of the students come at the end of August. They’re shy, they’re nervous, they’re frightened, they’re going to a new country staying with a family they’ve never met in their lives and their first language is going to be English, which is not their first language at home.”

Bernie says that by June many of the students have just gone home and “they’re so confident, fluent in English, they’re more ambitious to do well for themselves in life as well”.

In May of this year, on the night of the National Enterprise Awards where Student Programmes Ireland LTD was a finalist, the then Taoiseach Enda Kenny said: “Local Enterprise Offices exists to help small Irish companies starting out. Since the LEOs were established in 2014, they have supported in excess of 11,000 new jobs. We will continue to deliver on that potential, continue to unearth the new generation of entrepreneurs and continue to promote a culture of self-help and self-start across every county, parish and community in Ireland.” CL

For more information, visit www.spil.ie or call 063 30939 or email info@spil.ie or bernie@spil.ie

Engineering brick by brick

Innovative new summer camps have been set up this year to foster young people’s engineering talents and help them change the face of the engineering industry brick by brick, using none other than Lego.

The fun programme is designed to encourage teenagers, especially females, into engineering, by using the eternally-popular building blocks, to show secondary school students what it is like to work within a manufacturing environment, while also developing their creative and technical skills.

The first camp, Build and Programme, took place at the end of June and saw students use Lego Technic sets for building and Lego Mindstorms for programming. A second camp, ECubers Inventor, took place at the end of July, where ‘the Great Ball Contraption’ was built.

ECubers summer camps are open for 13- to 15-year-olds and were held this summer at the University of Limerick (UL).

The programme is run by ESE Academy, an industry-led, not-for-profit initiative that aims to advance the delivery of Equipment Systems Engineering (ESE) education. ESE Academy was set up by Irish-owned software engineering company SL Controls, in conjunction with UL.

Co-founder of SL Controls, Shane Loughlin, says he established the ECubers programme to highlight the benefits of engineering as a career for young men and women, and to help address the shortage of young people pursuing careers in the sector.

“Very little has been done to explain to young people, especially girls, how much engineering has evolved over the last 20 years. We want to get young people excited about and interested in engineering – and what could be a more fun way to do that than by using Lego to help children relate to engineering.”

UCC speciality food diploma

Any readers who work in the artisan and speciality food sector, or wish to get involved in the industry, may be interested in taking note of University College Cork (UCC’s) diploma in speciality food production. Applications for the course starting in September 2017 are now being accepted.

Since the foundation of the diploma in 2005, UCC has provided education and training to more than 200 people working in the artisan and speciality food sector. The programme is run on a part-time basis from September to May.

Typically, the course content is delivered every three to four weeks, mostly over two days, Tuesday and Wednesday. It consists of lectures, along with practical demonstrations, case studies, site visits and workshops.

Application forms and more information can be obtained from Dr Angela Sheehan, by emailing a.sheehan@ucc.ie or by visiting www.ucc.ie/en/fitu. The closing date for applications is 1 September 2017.

Time 100 Hero to

speak at CIT event

A lady who was named in the Heroes category in the 2010 Time 100 (an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world) will be speaking at an event taking place at the Nexus Stadium in Cork Institute of Technology (CIT) on Friday 18 August between 2-5pm. This lady is Dr Temple Grandin, subject of the award-winning semi-biographical film Temple Grandin.

Dr Grandin is an autism spokesperson and a professor of animal science at Colorado State University. She is also a consultant to the livestock industry on animal behaviour.

She is one of the first people on the autism spectrum globally to publicly share insights from her own experience of autism and is the author of many books on autism.

At this event she will describe the challenges she has faced and offer ideas about how others dealing with autism can take on these obstacles and improve the quality of their lives.

The event is hosted by IMPACT’s special needs assistant’s Munster branch.