Champion athletes row in to help raise €26,000 for charity groups

THE ship came in for a voluntary group working with drug users and homeless people yesterday.

Merchants Quay Ireland was handed a cheque for €16,000 by world champion rower Gearóid Towey.

The Cork native, together with fellow rower Ciarán Lewis, collected the money as part of a fundraising campaign when the pair attempted to row across the Atlantic in November 2005.

Mr Towey, 29, and from Fermoy, is one of Ireland’s most successful international rowers. He was a world champion in 2001 and 1996 and reached the Olympic semi-finals in 2004.

Mr Lewis, 35, and from Dublin, is one of the country’s leading domestic oarsmen and has seven Irish Championships to his name.

The pair decided to raise money for charities when they made an attempt to row across the Atlantic in the 2005 Atlantic rowing race. Their boat capsized 40 days into the challenge and they had to be rescued.

“We decided to raise money from all the awareness we would get, so we linked up with two charities, Merchants Quay and the Irish Cancer Society,” said Mr Towey yesterday, as he handed over a cheque to Tony Geoghegan, director of Merchants Quay.

The fundraising campaign in Munster, organised by Mr Towey’s dad, Gerry, raised €16,000 for Merchants Quay and €10,000 for the Irish Cancer Society.

Mr Towey said that the campaign in Dublin had not yet finished, but that they expected to collect about the same again for both charities.

He said he choose Merchants Quay after seeing so much homelessness in Dublin.

“You see homeless people on the street every day walking around Dublin and the drug problem is quite bad, so I went off and did a bit of research, came in here and spoke to Tony.”

Receiving the cheque, Mr Geoghegan said: “We’re not really big on fundraising and it’s often hard to raise — particularly for drugs, because it wouldn’t elicit a great level of sympathy among the public.

“This is fantastic for us.”