It was World Suicide Prevention Day on Wednesday. Maybe you noticed, or maybe it passed you by. Maybe the world’s on fire and you have a thousand plates spinning in your own little corner of it and maybe you haven’t the time, the bandwidth or the inclination to pay it any mind. That’s a good thing. Minding yourself is good.
Also good is the fact that suicides are down in Ireland. We don’t hear that a lot. The process is gradual and grinding and nothing about the future is set in stone. But there’s any amount of misery to point to when we talk about suicide. We should take succour and encouragement where we can.
Figures from the CSO show that since the turn of the century, there have only been four years in which the number of suicides in Ireland was below 400 – all four have happened since 2017. In 2001, there were 519 deaths by suicide recorded in a population of 3.8 million people. Last year, there were 351 deaths by suicide in a population of 5.3 million. This is progress.
At the coalface, so many organisations are working to fuel that progress. Some are the ones you’d expect. The HSE, for instance, is currently running a Let’s Talk About Suicide programme, an attempt to challenge misconceptions and reduce stigma around the subject.
RM Block
“A common myth suggests that talking about suicide encourages someone to think about suicide,” says Ailish O’Neill of the National Office for Suicide Prevention. “The evidence in fact shows that the opposite is true. By asking someone directly about suicide, you give a person permission to tell you how they feel. This can be the first step in keeping a person alive.”
You might wonder what any of this has to do with the GAA. And, for long swathes of its history, the GAA would have wondered that too. Suicide is such a private thing, such an unknowable thing, there would have been a view that it was beyond the remit of a sporting organisation to be getting involved. Ultimately though, it was left with no choice.
Sometime around the beginning of the 2010s, Croke Park started getting calls out of the blue. A town or village somewhere in the country would be reeling from a tragedy – sometimes a car crash, sometimes a suicide – and in the desperate hours of helpless casting around that followed, someone in the local GAA club would ring Croke Park. What do we do? How do we handle this? Where do we start?
At GAA headquarters, staff would do their best to scramble some sort of help but it was ad hoc and it felt like half a loaf. There was no real science to it, no notion of what was best practice. And so after a while, when the calls kept coming, they decided to bring a bit of order to their response.
“We realised that we needed to put some formality and structure around it,” says Colin Regan, the GAA’s health and wellbeing manager at the time. “Niall Donohue’s death was the first one really in my time, Galway GAA were phenomenal in their response to it. But it was something – along with the death of Garda Adrian Donoghue, actually – that brought it home to us that sometimes there are things that happen in GAA communities that demand a level of media attention and scrutiny and that just become so multifaceted.
“It happens so quickly and so out of the blue and it immediately involves so many elements of the local community and society. We realised we needed to do some work on this and reach out to organisations that have real expertise in the area.”
The result is the GAA’s Critical Incident Response Plan, which has been rolled out over the past decade and a bit, available to every club in the country. It’s a step-by-step guide to what to do when the worst happens. It’s the sort of thing that nobody ever wants to know about until they have to. But it’s there when they do.
As time has passed, GAA units all around the country have become more expert than they would wish in how to handle the whole area. Dave Murray was recently appointed the health and wellbeing officer for Leinster GAA, having spent most of the past decade filling the role in Wicklow. He is all too familiar with suicides and their aftermath and the despair of families retracing all their steps, taken and not taken.
“I suppose the question you hear most often is ‘Why?’” says Murray. “There is a reason. It’s just that it’s not always obvious. I was doing a course one time, and I can’t remember who the speaker was, but he was talking about young lads, right? He said, young lads, if they’re happy all the time, there’s often something wrong. Young lads, by their nature, they should be grumpy, hormonal bastards, you know?
“And he says quite frequently, people say, ‘Oh my God, there was nothing wrong with him. He seemed grand.’ I have experienced both sides of it: one, where people were in utter bewilderment, and then other situations where there was a reason. Sometimes it was subtle and sometimes it was more obvious.”
Murray has been county vice-chairman, chair of Wicklow Coiste na nÓg, press officer, children’s officer, press officer for the national Puc Fada competition and plenty more. There are, he stresses, dozens of Dave Murrays dotted around the country. The kind of GAA volunteers who get dragooned into all the jobs that are going and have no choice but to be good at them.
[ Niall Donohue story shows how little we know about suicideOpens in new window ]
He became Wicklow GAA’s health and wellbeing officer around 2012, without really knowing what it involved. The health and wellbeing committee started out small, getting every club, training centre and county ground in Wicklow to make a sign with their Eircode on it and hang it in a prominent spot. That way, ambulances would be able to find them in an emergency. Clubs made their grounds smoke-free and vape-free. The committee promoted healthy eating and exercise initiatives. All easy wins.
Over time, the focus on mental health has become as important as physical health. Murray started off by providing a simple list of phone numbers to clubs – the HSE, Pieta House and so on – so that people became more aware that there was somewhere to go. The committee did a social media campaign with the Samaritans in the run-up to Christmas. It did something similar in the run-up to Cheltenham.
“We’re not telling anybody what to do,” he says. “It’s more, ‘If you’re in trouble, here’s where to get help.’ And the reality is that people that end their own life by suicide, in most cases they’re looking for a way not to do it. I am not an expert but I’ve had a lot of experience.
“The evidence that I’ve been told is that people go through a kind of a process. They’re afraid. They don’t want to do it. But they just can’t see any other way. For them, it’s the best possible outcome. You know, this thing of, ‘Everybody will be better off without me.’
“So I suppose the question then is how do you help somebody. Number one, a big part of our role would be promoting positive mental health. So exercise and healthy eating are a great way of promoting positive mental health. They’re things we would be promoting as a health and wellbeing committee anyway.
“Good sleep patterns, having something to look forward to, stressing the importance of all of those things. But also talking. We all have good days and bad days and there’s nobody in this world who hasn’t suffered some kind of a depressive moment in their lives. Sometimes you need help in finding a way to cope with them.”
The grim reality is that suicides will happen. GAA clubs, county boards and provincial councils do good work, along with all the other NGOs and charities and the HSE, and the numbers have been trending in the right direction. But the numbers are still the numbers. And the numbers are people in communities, which is where the Critical Incident Response Plan comes in.
“Most people in a club will be involved, with the permission of the family. Car-parking, making sandwiches, all the usual things clubs do. That’s provided the family want it. So the very first thing the health and wellbeing committee would do would be find somebody that is close to the family and find out what the family’s wishes are. Their wishes may be that they don’t want the club to be involved. It’s important to establish that.
“We have to be very worried about impressionable younger people and to understand that they may be going through a crisis themselves. And be conscious of them seeing that person getting a hero-worship send-off. How do you look after those people?
“The GAA advise that clubs don’t retire jerseys, for example. We do grieve for the person who has passed and we have to do that appropriately. But we can’t over-emphasise the act itself. Instead, we bring it back to the person. There’s good science behind that.”
None of this is easy. But we’re getting better at it. The progress is slow and painful and it takes a lot out of the people in the frontline. Murray had no idea what he was letting himself in for when he agreed to be a health and wellbeing officer.
“I have found some people that have taken their own lives,” he says. “The initial shock, devastation, puzzlement – sometimes you just did not see it coming. Although I’ve done the training now with the HSE and that kind of thing, so I’d be more aware of the subtle signs. Hindsight can be difficult that way. When you go and do the courses in suicide prevention – you’re kind of saying, ‘God, if I knew then what I know now, things could have been different.’
“That takes a little bit of getting your head around. I’ve had a bit of anguish about that. But look, we are not responsible. We can’t take responsibility for another person’s decision. I think those courses are really, really worthwhile, though.
“There’s something happening. I believe suicide rates in Ireland are down and that’s probably because of the fact that people are more willing to talk about mental health issues in general. And hopefully something that we’re doing is helping that conversation.”
You can access Let’s Talk About Suicide at https://traininghub.nosp.ie/
The GAA’s Critical Incident Plan is available at https://www.gaa.ie/my-gaa/community-and-health/community-personal-development/cirp-training
If you are affected by any of the issues in this piece, please contact The Samaritans at 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.ie
