MY TY:Eugene Egan and his classmates in Blackrock College are selling St Patrick's Day badges in aid of Goal and Aidlink

I COULD HAVE kicked this straight off by gushing my emotions, or with a soulful, ponderous line such as "every seven seconds, a child dies from hunger", but instead, I'll tell you the tale of a boy's Transition year project.

Well, I'm afraid that I am going to talk about charity. But not the kind you'd expect. I am not building houses in Uganda, nor teaching in an overcrowded, makeshift school in Calcutta.

You see, every year, my school, Blackrock College, runs a campaign for the charities Goal and Aidlink. We sell Goal badges - they're the shamrock badges with the word Goal stitched across them that appear around St Patrick's Day - and every last penny we raise from selling these badges is split evenly between Goal and Aidlink.

This programme has been active in our school for 19 years now, and in that time the school has raised just short of €2 million. Two million euro. Yes, ladies and gentlemen,

we're that good. Hold the applause, though, because there's something else that sets this particular project apart from any other in Ireland: it's run by the Transition Year students.

That's right, 15- and 16-year-olds are being put in charge of an event that raises hundreds of thousands of euro, with no training. Walking into the administration office is like a journey to a Neverland of sorts, where the children are in charge, and the adults are looked upon with disdain.

Who makes up our Neverland-esque family? The 200-odd students in the year are divided into a few different teams. The direct sales team, for instance, look after businesses, getting badges to companies or shops. The Secondary Schools and Primary Schools teams reach out to other educational institutions in the area, selling badges to the pupils there. The overseas team sends badges all across the world in the lead-up to St Patrick's Day.

And watching over it all are the administration team, sitting on their thrones, nodding silently as their plans visibly come to fruition.

I am a member of the administration team. We're the students in charge of keeping the rest of the students in line, through a carefully devised system of controlled anarchy. We oversee every sale, all the envelope-packing, and every feature of this expedition into the world of charity. Our 'mission-control' room is alive (and sometimes even frantic) with industry - we only have from the middle of February to March 17th to sell up to 150,000 badges, so things have to happen fast.

A thing I noticed that surprised me a bit, being part of the admin group, was that there are very few "passengers" involved in the project. No-one shrugs off a task. It seems that everyone is incredibly motivated to do whatever they can. Contrary to the popular stereotype, it seems that we Transition years are actually doing work. And doing good work. Why? Probably because we all know that each shamrock badge we sell could well be worth a week's supply of food for the poorest of the poor.

I think the moral of this little story is that you don't need to dig wells in Africa to do charitable deeds. Just buy a little green badge for €2 (available in your local newsagent's now!)