Pictures: Festive feast sees 720 students at Cork school tuck into Christmas dinner 

MORE than 700 pupils of a Cork city secondary school celebrated Christmas early, with a special festive feast at school this week.

As part of a tradition that started eight years ago, pupils were served a traditional Christmas meal including turkey, ham and all the trimmings at school.

Principal of Coláiste Éamann Rís, formerly Deerpark CBS, Aaron Wolfe, said that when they first started the initiative at the school, there were just 200 students attending the city secondary school, but pupil numbers have grown significantly since then.

“We’ve been running this Christmas feast in the school since 2015. Back then we only had 200 students so originally the whole school would have all had their dinner in hall together,” Mr Wolfe told The Echo.

“Now we have 720 students, so we did it in year groups. They each got a half an hour slot to come down to the hall and have their Christmas dinner.”

O’Crualaoi Butchers catered for the event, serving up a traditional Irish festive dinner with all the trimmings including turkey, ham, potatoes, stuffing, gravy, peas and carrots to the students as they began the wind down before their Christmas exams.

Mr Wolfe explained: “It originally started for a sad reason, we know some of the children won’t get a Christmas dinner, some of their families don’t sit down together to eat, or they might get a lot of takeaways, so it’s a nice way of sitting down together as a community.

“We have international students who haven’t experienced an Irish Christmas dinner, it’s different in every country, they wouldn’t all have turkey and ham, so it’s lovely to share that with them, and it went down really well,” he said.