Students of St Patrick’s National school in Castlebar are the new Chess for all-National Champions.

Zalan Nemeth, Darragh Ludden, Killian O'Malley and Evan Doyle are pictured in Today’s Irish Times with their trophy.

50 schools took part in the finals which were held over the weekend and involved an estimated 180 children

The Castlebar team took the title and won  €300, four chess clocks and four chess sets and their names will be inscribed on a perpetual trophy.

The trophy is the former Irish Times Game of the Year chess perpetual trophy, recently found in the polishing room at Weirs Jewellers on Dublin’s Grafton Street. A small silver trophy, it had been left in for engraving 50 years ago but was never picked up.

It used to be awarded to the best Irish chess player with the last winner inscribed on it in 1962. That was Dr Vincent Maher (82), now in Stockport.

Following reports of the trophy’s discovery at Weirs, a group called Chess For All, which runs free nationwide chess-education programmes for schoolchildren, asked whether it might be available to them as a perpetual prize.

Its chairman Michael Crowe contacted Allan Kilpatrick of Weirs and the editor of The Irish Times Kevin O’Sullivan, and they agreed to make it available.

 The Castlebar students will be the next names inscribed on the trophy, a half a century later.