Mizen Rovers GAA Club have been the named as FBD’s Community Champions for Change following a nationwide search as part of the FBD Champions for Change programme – a major national farm safety and awareness initiative.
The group which is focused on highlighting safety in their community 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.
Connie O’Driscoll, Mizen Rovers GAA 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.”
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. They first launched a ‘Care for our 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.
They 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.
Connie O’Driscoll continued, “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.
