Head Coach Caroline Murray, left, Team Ireland's mixed double pairing of Fiona Brady, a member of Navan Arch Special Olympics Club, from Navan, Co. Meath, and Sean Sammon, a member of Castlebar Special Olympics Club, from Castlebar, Co. Mayo, after their Mixed Doubles Table Tennis Qualifier on day four of the World Special Olympic Games 2023 at the Messe Berlin, Germany. Photo: Ray McManus/Sportsfile Legacies help to provide sports, health, wellbeing and community for people with intellectual disabilities, writes Jason Osborne
You may remember the joyous scenes that graced our screens at the beginning of the summer, as Irish athletes took part in and returned home from the Special Olympics World Summer games 2023, which took place in Berlin.
Wonderful though the event was – and it was, for all 73 athletes, their coaches and their families and friends – the world games are but the cherry on top of an important and enduring body of work carried out by Special Olympics Ireland, CEO Matt English tells me. The organisation’s key pillars are sports, health and wellbeing, athlete leadership and the young athlete programme.
“Special Olympics is a global organisation. In Special Olympics Ireland we offer a number of programmes. Whilst we are a charity and a disability organisation, we are first and foremost a sports organisation for people with an intellectual disability. Approximately two percent of the population have an intellectual disability and they have many more challenges in life across all spectrums,” Mr English says.
To thrive
“Certainly their health and wellbeing and confidence would be lower than mainstream population and Special Olympics plays a huge, important part in giving them an environment to thrive, to grow in confidence, to gain respect and to belong.”
Helping people with ID to get fit is very important, Mr English says, as many have underlying health conditions. As such, they focus, too, on the athletes health and wellbeing.
“We focus a lot on health and wellbeing as well, and this includes mental health for our athletes, but also we’d have various different programmes and workshops that athletes would go on, that local clubs would run and we facilitate the training and recruit volunteers that will run those health and wellbeing programmes.
“It also includes doing various health assessments at various games, like the Berlin games, there would have been a healthy athlete programme, where everything from their eyesight to their hearing to their podiatry to their dentistry would have been checked and they would have given them tools for mindfulness and all of that to deal with stress,” he says.
Families
The work Special Olympics Ireland carries out means a lot not just to the athletes, but to their families, too, and Mr English has personal experience of this, his brother, John, having had an intellectual disability.
“It’s really important for the families as well. I had a brother with an intellectual disability as well and I saw how much sport meant to him. Sadly he passed away when he was 21, but he had a very good life and the whole family were very proud of his achievements and Special Olympics in the early days was an important part of his life.”
A wide variety of sports are on offer for those who choose to check Special Olympics out, with over 250 clubs across the island of Ireland and many different Olympic sports on offer between them.
“Athletes turn up and play a sport of their choice. Now, we can’t offer every sport in every community, but some athletes are members of two or three different clubs because they want to do basketball and they want to do swimming and they want to do bowling. We offer 15 different sports,” Mr English explains.
“Some athletes turn up to the club, they have fun – they may not participate in advancement competitions because it’s leisure, but there is the opportunity for a large percentage of our registered athletes to go through various leagues, go through advancement competitions and potentially represent their region or represent Special Olympics Ireland on a global stage.”
And what a stage it is – the most recent games in Berlin welcomed 7,000 athletes, 190 nations, 20,000 volunteers and 300,000 spectators from all across the world. As might be expected, the games were a phenomenal success, and Ireland really put its talent on display.
Medals
“It was fantastic altogether. The 73 athletes, some of them will have competed in a number of events, like gymnastics you may compete in four to six different disciplines, so we actually had 24 gold medals, 22 silver medals and 29 bronze medals which was wonderful, but we had a lot of personal bests too,” Mr English says.
Applauding those who finished with medals, Mr English says that they were equally delighted with all of those who competed, especially those who achieved a new personal best. After all, the Special Olympics athlete oath is, “Let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt”.
Unfortunately, like the Church, Special Olympics Ireland continues to struggle with the aftereffects of the pandemic, with many older and longtime athletes and volunteers stepping aside following the massive disruption Covid represented.
Volunteers
“We have a challenge to recruit more volunteers – in pockets – but still it’s a material number. We have a number of athletes, more likely the older ones, and people with ID would have been more profoundly impacted by the pandemic than other groups, so we certainly don’t have the same volume. Whilst we’re attracting new athletes and we’re growing young athlete clubs, we certainly haven’t got the same level of participation, which is something we’re very focused on,” Mr English says.
“We will have to work very hard to get back to the participation levels that we had pre-pandemic. We will get there but it will probably be a mix of recruiting new athletes, reaching out, maybe opening some new clubs or having new ways of doing things.”
Legacy donations are a vital source of income for the work Special Olympics Ireland carries out, and Mr English can’t emphasise enough how appreciated they are, acknowledging the personal, and often sensitive, nature of such donations.
“Fundraising and raising money, we cannot do what we do without people and without finance. The people are predominantly volunteers that make things happen, but all income, and legacies would be a really important source. They really are contributing to the future of the local community and the opportunities and joy and connection that we can bring for our athletes. Every donation, every legacy, makes a difference, and in the same way, every new person with an ID, who comes to a Special Olympics club, it’s not just changing their life, but it’s changing the life of their family and their community as well,” Mr English says.
“I know that legacies are a very sensitive subject and that it’s a very personal process for individuals. I also understand that family, and legacy to the family, has to come first, but I think it’s really important for people to consider, no matter how small, whether it’s a one percent of their legacy, to commit it to a worthy charity that means something to them, it does make a real difference and obviously it would make a real difference to the local community if we had more people thinking of Special Olympics when they make their legacy.”
For more information, visit https://www.specialolympics.ie/