National suicide crisis needs response from all of society

John Donohoe's opinion piece published in this week's Meath Chronicle

Last Thursday morning, while pottering around the house, getting breakfast and preparing for work, I was listening to 'Morning Ireland’ on RTE Radio 1, when Des Cahill brought devastating news in the sports bulletin.
He reported the tragic death of Galway hurler, Niall Donohue. The sports star had taken his own life the night before his 23rd birthday.
I didn’t know Niall Donohue, even though we almost share a surname. But I know his home parish and club, Kilbeacanty, between Loughrea and Gort in Galway. It was my grandfather Matt Hanbury’s home parish, and over the years I have been in the GAA grounds where Niall played his club hurling, and the church where his funeral took place at the weekend, and the bar, McCarthy’s, where, no doubt, the locals have been gathering in shock over the past week.
It is a typical Irish rural parish, spread out slightly, as the church and graveyard aren’t adjoining each other, and the GAA grounds are a bit further down the road. It’s not a village as such, more a community.
The famous tower associated with William Butler Yeats, Thoor Ballylee, is nearby. The closest town is Gort, and further on the road to Galway city is Coole Park, where Lady Gregory resided. Kilbeacanty was also home to Navan’s Market Square bull sculpture for a long time, as its sculptor Colin Grehan, lived there.
Niall Donohue was described as 'the shining light’ of Kilbeacanty and its club: “the best of his generation, the best many of us had ever seen wear the blue and gold”.
That isolated area had seen so many lost to emigration, but, a local tribute continued: “As long as we had Niall, we had a chance; you could see the players around him grow tall just by his presence, you knew you had a chance,     that the opponents would find it 
hard to break us down if Niall was on form”.
And the player was popular with his team-mates, especially for his mimicking abilities. Even though he was a quiet lad, he was well able to crack a joke and enjoy his life. Tellingly, last week, Galway manager Anthony Cunningham said that there were times when he would not have been that well, “but we would have worked with him behind the scenes, and crack jokes about winning and losing and be very supportive of him”.
Niall made the breakthrough at minor level for the county, and was one of the stars of the Galway team that beat Dublin in the All-Ireland Under-21 final at Semple Stadium in 2011. Later that year, he joined the senior panel and was on the team that won last year’s Leinster final. He was shortlisted for an All-Star award.
But now, he is gone. Another young life quenched. On Wednesday, before the news broke of Niall’s death, a press release arrived to our news desk. It featured Cian O’Sullivan, a star of this year’s All-Ireland winning Dublin senior football team, launching a show which takes place in the National Concert Hall next month in aid of 3Ts (Turning the Tide of Suicide).
O’Sullivan said the 3Ts is a fantastic organisation working everyday to help prevent deaths by suicide through research, intervention and support.
He added: “Raising awareness about the problem of suicide in Ireland is really important to me. It’s pretty scary the fact that there are more deaths from suicide in young men under the age of 26 than cancer and road accidents.”
Little did he know that a fellow inter-county GAA player was about to become another one of those young men.
It is not just the young men who are being affected. All of us, our families, friends, neighbours, communities, have been touched by what has become a national crisis.
Less than a year ago, this county was plunged into mourning when one of our Dail deputies, Shane McEntee, took his own life. Darren Sutherland, Navan’s Olympic bronze-medal winning boxer, died tragically in London in September 2009.
Three Sundays ago when Gaeil Colmcille won the Intermediate County Final, the first place they went with the Mattie McDonnell Cup was to David Drew’s grave in St Colmcille’s Cemetery, having lost their goalkeeper last December.
Every week, more people are taking their own lives - men and women, young and old. God only knows what is going through someone’s mind when they make this fateful decision - money worries, health issues, sexuality or relationship problems, peer pressure, club or county team pressures, work stress - but it is a final action from which there is no return, and which leaves everyone else concerned devastated in its wake, asking why, feeling guilty, blaming themselves.
Paddy O’Rourke, Meath and International Rules footballer and student union welfare officer at Dundalk IT, last week said that Niall Donohue’s death was a tragic reminder that inter-county players were not immune to the distress caused by mental health issues.
“You should always feel that there’s somebody there, one of your friends, one of your family members that you can pick up the phone and to say 'I want to have a chat’,” he said.
And last week in Navan, Fr Kevin Heery, CC, celebrating the funeral of a young woman who died in tragic circumstances, prayed that her family and friends would have the strength to cope with her passing, and that also, we are all strong enough to talk to somebody and ask for help if we find we are in a situation that seems hopeless to us.
It is a difficult, sensitive and emotional subject, but one which we need, as Cian O’Sullivan says, to turn the tide on. And keep the tide out altogether.
The message of young Kerry teenager Donal Walsh, as he was dying from cancer early this summer, to 'live life’ and that suicide is not the answer, needs to be spread across the country.