Cork GAA club named FBD's champions for change for farm safety awareness

Mizen Rovers GAA is 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.

Training almost 100 children in the Mizen peninsula area, the group began in 2010 as a way to maintain club spirit and stay connected through the off season. It first launched a care for players campaign that focused on the areas of health, wellbeing, jobs and enterprise and road safety before taking on the issue of farm safety in 2014. Club member Connie O'Driscoll spoke about the initiative.

"We felt for years we just saw the kids for three or four months of the year that they just came in for the training and the playing of games, and we needed to have a bit more involvement in their lives and in the issues that affected them.

"So we started a little programme called Care for our Players and one component of that was farm safety. We started that by taking a group of lads to a tractor driving course. We erected some signage in the dressing room with farm safety messages. We also decided to visit some of the local primary schools to spread the message of farm safety to the younger kids," he said.

The club provided a farm safety pack for local primary schools which included high-vis vests and dedicated educational materials to teach children about farm safety.

Strong influence

The GAA has such a strong influence in many parts of rural Ireland, Connie said, 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.

"Farming, like GAA, plays a big role in the local community. In fact, we found that about nine out of 10 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," he said.

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," she said.

As winners of FDB’s Community Champions for Change award, Mizen Rovers GAA Club will receive €1,000 which will go toward expanding its outreach beyond the local community and will be used for educational tools for schools such as farm safety books and games.