'We want people to feel safe while swimming': Young Cork inventors win top national prize 

Six young West Cork innovators are celebrating after their potentially life-saving invention has won a prestigious national engineering award.

The young scientists, who are pupils in third class in Barryroe National School, have won the 2025 Engineers Ireland STEPS Young Engineers Award for their invention, the Water Safety Wristband.

The Barryroe team faced strong competition, with almost 4,000 primary school children from all over the country submitting more than 550 projects.

The STEPS Young Engineers Award encourages children aged from eight to 11 to develop creative engineering projects to help or improve their local community.

The Barryroe team, called The Burger Bites, designed a wristband which contains a compressed air cannister that inflates a balloon when a lever is pulled, helping a swimmer to stay afloat if they get into difficulty.

The young inventors said they had been inspired to create their safety device because "we want people to feel safe while swimming".

The Burger Bites is comprised of teammates Rian O’Leary, Meg Adams, Saidhbh Deasy, Conor Griffin, Aoife Whelton and Zac Guerin.

The competition was judged by engineers from ARUP, eFlow, Engineers Ireland, ESB, Intel and TII who noted how the Barryroe pupils developed several prototypes to improve their design, including a working prototype.

Another West Cork primary school, St Mary’s in Rosscarbery, took the runner up prize for their project, Renewable Energy Ecofriendly Lighting.

Praising this year’s entrants to the STEPS Young Engineers Award, Damien Owens, director general of Engineers Ireland, said engineering was about the application of science to real world problems, developing solutions that can assist people across the world.

“It is marvellous to see the students at Barryroe National School excel in this approach to problem solving with this creative design and congratulations to all of our entrants this year for their innovation and hard work on their projects,” Mr Owens said.

“The future of Irish engineering is indeed in good hands.”