Young Historian Ireland

Discover the history on your doorstep

2026 Young Historians  Read some of the winning submissions
Winning entries

Over the past five years, hundreds of projects have been submitted by students at Ballinamore, Carrigallen, Lough Allen, Drumshanbo, and Mohill. Awards were presented in May to the winners.

Read about the 2026 and past programmes here >>>

About Young Historian Ireland

Young Historian was launched in 2020 in Leitrim to encourage young people to engage with their personal and local history and to develop the skills of history. YH has two clear goals:

  1. Inspire students to value their personal and local history, and develop their sense of place - whether that place is in Ireland or elsewhere.
  2. Help students develop the skills of history, including research, forming questions, interrogating findings, and storytelling.
    These skills are increasingly critical for all roles and careers in society, particularly given the advances in generative AI.

Read more here >>>

Some specific guidance for teachers on the programme and process, and on how to run the programme with TY classes.

This page requires a password. If you do not have a password or have lost it, please contact us using the contact form below.

A note about AI

A personal note from Fiona Slevin to teachers in May 2026

_________________

In 2026, we had 44 entries in total. Some showed real inspiration and integrity. Last year, we saw the beginning of AI/LLMs being used. This year, it was significant. Many students explained how and why they used it, but others did not, even where the disconnect in language and content was evident. 

AI is here and will stay. It is up to all of us how we use it for good. If I was able to attend your ceremony, I would probably plead the following with the students:

  1. Large Language Models are good at text-prediction and production, and have zero capability to understand that text. They have no common sense, reasoning, or experience of physical reality. Long-time AI experts argue that scaling, bigger models, more data, more computing power, will not bridge that gap.
  2. Use AI as an assistant, not to replace your own thinking. Using LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, CoPilot, etc) stifles the brain’s ability to imagine and think by slowing activity in brain cells. Letting AI do the thinking work for us also slows brain activity in other domains, making us potentially more passive actors in our own lives. (See https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026/05/02/every-time-we-take-the-easy-route-and-let-ai-think-for-us-first-we-risk-weakening-our-brains/)
  3. When you use an LLM, read what it has produced: 
  4. LLMs hallucinate because the way they are built rewards guessing over acknowledging uncertainty. 
  5. LLMs produce flowery language filled with unneccesary adjectives to mask their lack of intelligence. For students, the disconnect between their own voice, grammar and vocabulary is visible if they do not take the care to edit. 
  6. Finally, to students: 
  7. You have a unique brain and personality, with unique thoughts and ideas. Stay curious, and stay confident. The world has put you in the worst position where you have to choose between two options. You can choose to either discover and share your unique voice, thoughts and ideas, or, you can allow the machines and algorithms to hijack your brain before you even know your own mind. The first option – choosing to be you – is arguably the scariest and most difficult option.
  8. Stay curious, and go boldly. After returning safely to earth, Christina Hammock Koch, astronaut on the Artemis II mission, recalled her reaction to being invited to join the mission. She said: ‘Questioning yourself, questioning the path that you're on, questioning your ability, having confidence in yourself, have all been struggles I've had through the years and... the way to overcome those struggles isn't to do less, it's to do more. It's to do what scares you ... Go in that direction boldly.’

A further general note on AI:

GenAI use is reducing students’ ability to think

Concerns about AI use amongst secondary school students are backed by research. GenAI use is reducing students’ ability to think. Teenagers’ analytical reasoning, study motivation, and critical thinking all decline significantly with use of AI. Further, students using GenAI tutors have been shown to perform worse in related exams, and had an inflated sense of their own learning and knowledge. In our Young Historian projects, we saw how AI eroded the students’ creativity and confidence in their own content and voice. Far from being a collaborative tool, the use of AI often generated ‘perfect’ language and visibly clashed with the student’s original vision for the project. This is not the same as cheating.

 

Students can use AI to cheat 

Students can use AI to cheat, but focusing on cheating and detection neglects the real potential damage. In general, using GenAI stifles the brain’s ability to imagine and think by slowing activity in brain cells. Letting AI do the thinking work for us also slows brain activity in other domains, making us potentially more passive actors in our own lives. 

 

We are negligent if we do not act

AI is here and will stay, but the pace of uptake by students is not being matched by intentional safeguards. Outside of academic schooling, teenagers are increasingly using GenAI to enquire about relationships, identity and sexuality, and to seek emotional support. As well as the potential toxic impact of these interactions, there are issues of privacy and data ownership. When young people are feeding AI models with anxieties, beliefs, emotions and experiences: who owns the data? and who is monitoring the AI training and algorithmic development based on such input?

Standing by while students use AI is not progress and it is not innovative; it is negligent. We need to implement rules and training for students and teachers. And we need to shift the focus in education to value the learning process rather than the product, and to value unique voices over mechanistic homogeneity.


Fiona Slevin, PhD, May 2026

Contact us

Send us an email and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.