By Kevin Herron
On Saturday 27th August Bremar Training CIC in conjunction with Antrim GAA will deliver a seminar to raise awareness of Mental Health to club delegates in the County.
Taking place at Dunsilly Hotel from 9.30am-2.30 pm, Bremar will deliver the PITCH Programme (Positive Impact To promote Club / Community Health) to Antrim clubs and be joined by former Armagh star and GAA pundit Oisin McConville- who will share his journey through the struggles of gambling and Mental Health as Barney Herron and Mark McNally from Bremar explain.
“We’ve been employed by Antrim GAA to deliver our ground-breaking and popular programme based on Mental Health and Wellbeing and it’s called the PITCH programme (Positive Impact To promote Club/ Community Health)” they explained.
“ The seminar will be opened by Carál Ni Chullín MLA who has been a great support to Antrim GAA in relation to delivering the Casement Park Project and she has a high level understanding of the mental health needs of our members and communities. We’ have Oisin McConville coming as a key-note speaker, and he will share his personal experience about his journey with gambling and the affects it can have on your Mental Health. Oisin has completed podcasts for us before and delivered the story of his journey through addiction whilst he was a very well-known Gaelic footballer and how it impacted on him, his family and his friends- he understands that he was fortunate to come out the other end in one piece. “
“That is a big story that people are giving their own overviews of it and we’ve lots of other people like Siobhan Kearney – from At One Wellbeing who is an experienced programme designer and has a wealth of experience in delivering training to statutory, voluntary and community bodies as well as being a much sought after as a life coach by private business. She will chair the question-and-answer session after lunch”
“We’ve the four county captains in attendance in Gaelic, Hurling, LGFA and Camogie association. They’ll be coming with the trophies they won this year; it is a nice for people to have a photo opportunity for them as well”.
Former chairman at Lámh Dhearg and Antrim GAA Children’s Officer, Herron hopes that the programme will reach out t all the clubs and provide them with a structure that will enable them to help members that may be struggling with Mental Health.
“But the idea of the day is for us on behalf of Antrim GAA to get out and reach out to all the clubs and let them know that Mental Health is something that impacts all of us” Herron acknowledges.
“It’s something that touches every one of us in our own lives and what we’re attempting to do is show them that they can work on themselves in terms of their own Mental Health and Wellbeing; but not only that- they can bring that message back into their own clubs.
“Within the clubs, they can set-up structures, bring us in or set-up training that the members in their own club that are being impacted by Mental Health- have some way of dealing with it”.
Fellow Bremar Director Mark McNally recalls starting out in delivering programmes to clubs and recalls that their feedback altered the approach to this weekend’s seminar.
“What we’ve found a lot of the time was whenever we first started out- we were doing Suicide Awareness in the clubs” McNally recalls.
“What the clubs then were coming back to us and saying, they wanted something more for early intervention. That’s where PITCH came from, so it’s an early intervention programme about how people can start to look after their own Mental Health – but also about promoting it within their club if people are willing to talk about and there is no taboo around it anymore.
“That’s where Antrim GAA are really being proactive, they’re starting to push that they want clubs more open, and that people can talk about mental health and get support that they need early. There has been an awful lot done over the years around awareness of Mental Health, what we’re doing is taking this a stage further by promoting early intervention”
“We want to put people in a position where they are being proactive in dealing with these issues rather than wating for a crisis to happen. A number of our clubs have experienced members who have had poor mental health which has led to people completing suicide and the impact it has on clubs and young people playing each code at Juvenile and Senior level is imeasureable.”
“We’ve had a lot of people that have been impacted by the loneliness of the Covid pandemic and by separation from family and friends. It’s starting to come in clubs all over the country with males and females. The GAA has a strip line that ‘we are club and community’. We’ve stepped up and we’re offering this training to help our clubs and help the people within our clubs and community”.
Bremar currently deliver services to University’s, Youth organisations and Schools and hope to work closer with clubs in the aftermath of the weekend in a spin-off programme aimed that training up youth leaders within local clubs.
“Our programmes are being delivered out to St. Mary’s University, the Youth service and schools – we’ve a lot of work in the Irish Medium Education area”
“We’re now pushing to get involved in all of the schools and in every club in the county and indeed in Ulster and this is an opportunity that we feel Antrim have taken the initiative and employed us to do this and to start addressing the issue of Mental Health.
“Mark and I are currently working with the Ulster GAA with a focus on how we chart what resources are currently available and how we get the message of hope out to those who are experiencing poor mental health, and Antrim GAA has taken the initiative and are taking the lead in providing an opportunity to get this important programme out to our members and their communities”.
“We hope to be invited after this seminar to clubs to come out and deliver the programme and obviously the clubs are going to have to get funding to do that through their local councils”
“The spin-off with this is a programme called Positive Youth Champions – where we train a group of young leaders in the club around the positive impact of us working with them and Mental Health within their own community and club.
“They can deliver that through a peer-education approach within their own clubs. They get a qualification From ILM (Institute in Leadership and Management). We recently completed this programme with a group from Dunloy GAA and Ballymoney Rugby club. At the completion of the programme the young people involved delivered a mental health type presentation to an audience made up of parents, coaches mentors and their peer group and it was magnificent to see how their confidence and presentation skills and knowledge base had improved. We see this seminar as an opportunity for the clubs in Antrim to engage with Bremar and to assist our members and their communities deal with and understand issues relating to their own mental health needs”
Remember the date Saturday 27th August at Dunsilly hotel , Antrim.
To attend please contact Barney Herron at barney@bremartraining .com