Mark Governey doesn't remember what happened when he was playing in a rugby match for Lansdowne against Old Belvedere just over two years ago. Others who witnessed the accident will never forget.
The opposition fullback came in blind and Mark didn't see him until the last moment when he went in for the tackle. Mark took the full force and was thrown back into another Lansdowne player.
Seldom does such an innocent tackle have such catastrophic consequences. Such tackles happen every week in schools rugby, junior rugby and senior rugby, and the players get up and walk away. It is part of the thrill. Hit and be hit.
Mark didn't get up. When he regained consciousness the next day his family had assembled around his bed in the intensive care unit of the Matter Hospital. He had sustained a C4 injury - a severance of the spinal chord high up in the neck. He could not move.
Luckily for the player, a nurse from a team playing on a different pitch had administered CPR for half an hour while an ambulance arrived. That intervention had kept him alive.
Mark was put on a ventilator for six months and spent a year in the National Rehabilitation Centre in Dublin. The world he faces now is as a young man paralysed from the neck down.
Mark was covered by insurance taken out by the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU), which is only too aware of the potential for serious injury. It has adopted quite a comprehensive scheme but, as the Governey family now understands, the basic insurance is not enough to cover costs in the most severe cases.
The IRFU has a basic compulsory insurance scheme for everyone who plays the game. The standard annual cost is £1,122 (€1,426) per year per adult team, or £56 per player. Under-age players do not pay anything as the IRFU covers this cost.
This basic cover entitles a player who suffers catastrophic injury or total disability, such as Mark, to a £750,000 payout. That amount is approximately one-quarter of the amount needed for proper care.
The IRFU has been strongly encouraging clubs to top up their insurance cover but has been dismayed by the low numbers of people who actually take it up.
"It is a lack of awareness by players," says Mark. "People will think that it will never happen to them. Rugby has become so physical now but there isn't any awareness at all about the injury side. I think it should be highlighted much more.
"I'm one of the lucky ones because the fund-raising by my family after my injury was so successful. Other players who get injured won't be as lucky as I was in that respect. The IRFU fund helped me out but, for anyone who cannot raise a substantial amount in addition to that, it's totally inadequate. The medical expenses are sky high. It costs over £100,000 a year for me and that is not full-time care. At some stage or other, I'll have to go out on my own and the costs will go up even more. That's 24-hour care all the time. I think people should be aware of these things."
Rugby players are regularly paralysed - one or two a year end up in the rehabilitation unit. The governing body does what it can short of paying massive premiums to cover all players for enormous amounts, which is not feasible. Instead, it tries to encourage individual players to simply pay more.
The GAA also has a scheme. It is not as comprehensive as the rugby structure but the association also has difficulty convincing young men that serious injury is a possibility, if an extremely small one.
"In rugby, they have reached a situation where players and clubs won't pay any more premium," said one insurance official.
A leaflet sent out by the IRFU for additional cover for up to £500,000 each was taken up by less than 20 individuals. As insurers point out, players can buy £500,000 of permanent disability cover for £85 per annum.
People in the game now agree that with more muscular players, body armour and greater incentives to win, injuries of a serious nature are unlikely to decline. But the IRFU is clear. In the opening page of its accident cover notes, it spells out its view very clearly.
"The IRFU stress that the cover provided by the compulsory scheme is minimum only and it is recommended that clubs and individuals should purchase additional cover.
"Whilst the current compulsory cover is far greater than the cover provided by other sporting bodies, no one could accept that this would be sufficient to compensate a seriously injured player."
