GAA club wins national award for farm safety initiative
Mizen Rovers is focused on highlighting safety in their community, calling for the establishment of a dedicated farm safety organisation, and believes that the GAA has a key role to play in increasing the awareness of farm safety.
Mizen Rovers is the juvenile section of the Goleen GAA club in West Cork. Accepting the award, Connie O’Driscoll of Mizen Rovers said, “We are absolutely delighted to be named FBD’s Champions for Change 2016 as we have worked long and hard to promote farm safety awareness in our community for the past number of years.
“The GAA has such a strong influence in many parts of rural Ireland and the clubs are well positioned to help encourage this message of farm safety.
“We need to combine our resources to raise awareness and prevent the needless deaths that occur on Irish farms, be that through existing channels or through a new, dedicated farm safety organisation, similar to the Road Safety Authority.”
Seeking to maintain club spirit and stay connected with players through the off-season, a club sub-committee launched a ‘Care for our Players’ campaign in 2010, that focused on the areas of health, wellbeing, jobs and enterprise and road safety, before taking on the issue of farm safety in 2014.
The sub-committee team of O’Driscoll and his colleagues, Anne Murnane, Mary Hayes and Tim Sheehan, arranged a number of awareness activities for the local community, including special tractor driving courses for young people and a ‘Farm Safety Pack’ for local primary schools which included high-vis vests and dedicated educational materials to teach children about farm safety.
The farm safety course were subsidised by the local FBD office.
Last year, Mizen Rovers made a submission to the Seanad public consultation on farm safety, and had their recommendation that the GAA become more involved in farm safety adopted in the subsequent report.
Connie O’Driscoll said, “Farming, like GAA, plays a big role in the local community.
“In fact, we found that about nine out of ten of our club members were either living on farms or had family with farms locally.
“The GAA are community champions with an extensive network and we should be working together in order to reduce the risk.”
Fiona Muldoon, CEO of FBD, said, “The aim of the awards was to recognise those people making a real contribution in the area of farm safety and to highlight the importance of the need to look out for one another in the community.
“What the Mizen Rovers GAA Club has done is to come up with a template for promoting the message, one that can be replicated at a national level and we are delighted to lend them our support.”
As winners of FDB’s Community Champions for Change award, Mizen Rovers GAA Club will receive €1,000 which will go toward expanding their outreach beyond the local community, and will be used for educational tools for schools such as farm safety books and games etc.
The FBD Champions for Change programme is a major national farm safety and awareness initiative.
