The Special Olympics to be held in Ireland this year offer participating athletes a world stage. They present the rest of us with an opportunity to shed our ignorance and to realise the monumental shortsightedness of underestimating people with learning disabilities, writes Eileen Battersby.

No sports event on this scale has ever been staged in Ireland. And it will be the biggest international sports event in the world this year. Forget about the comic chaos, allegations and contradictions surrounding our failed attempt to co-host the 2008 European Football Championships. A cross-Border Ireland bid succeeded, with far less fuss and far more dignity, to win a greater prize - the honour and challenge of staging the 11th Special Olympics World Summer Games.

On June 21st, the longest day of the year, the Flame of Hope will arrive in Dublin for the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics. This will mark the final stage in a journey begun in Greece, the home of the ancient Olympic Games, some three weeks earlier.

It will be the first time since its inception in 1968 that the Special Olympics will be staged outside the US. The great world of sport, so tarnished by drug cheats, excessive commercialism, politics and scandals of every hue, can only gain from these World Games, in which the traditional notions of competitive effort at its purest will dominate.

Sportsmanship - a beautiful, ennobling concept currently battered by decades of petulance and greed - will be revived by the 7,000 athletes from across the world who earned their chance to represent their countries. For each of these competitors, taking part in the 18 official sports - including athletics, swimming, gymnastics, powerlifting and various equestrian events, as well as three demonstration sports including judo and kayaking - sport is an expression of self. It is also the ultimate test: learning to win - and lose. The Special Olympics oath sums it all up: "Let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt".

Special Olympics athletes conquer disabilities and go on to achieve performances that many of us could never match. This is particularly true of several of the sports, such as athletics, swimming and cycling.

Rita Lawlor, a distinguished former Irish Special Olympian, winner of World Games gold, silver and bronze medals in gymnastics, says "the Games change attitudes, they change your life".

In 1998, she was one of 12 Special Olympics athletes appointed as a Global Messenger of the Games. Lawlor, who wrote an engagingly direct autobiography, Moving On ("it took me five years, I wouldn't be the fastest at writing books"), points out that recognising people with learning disabilities is fundamental human rights in action.

"You can see what we can do," she says. "People don't understand what a learning disability is, they just don't know what it means. The Special Olympics changes that, it opens eyes. People are getting very aware that people with learning disabilities can do things. Come and see."

It was this essential point, the fact that people with learning disabilities can do things, and do them very well, that inspired Eunice Shriver to establish the Games.

Shriver was born into the famous Kennedy clan that included her brothers John and Robert. Their elder sister, Rosemary, had a mild learning disability. Rosemary's condition, the result of an inadequate oxygen supply to the brain at birth, was severely worsened when, at 23, her father, Joe Kennedy, insisted she undergo a prefrontal lobotomy.

After the operation, Rosemary could no longer live at home and was institutionalised. Shriver remained very close to her and knew her sister was a good swimmer and a very fine rider. It was her awareness at close hand of the abilities of people such as her sister that resulted in a summer day-camp in 1963, quickly progressing to the first summer games in 1968 contested by athletes from 26 US states and Canada, to what has become an international movement involving one million athletes.

While the Special Olympics offers an international, competitive stage for the sportsmen and women who have dedicated themselves to training for their sport with the view to winning and, most importantly, performing at their best, it presents the rest of us with an opportunity to shed our ignorance, to realise the stupidity of labels and the monumental shortsightedness of underestimating people with learning disabilities.

One of the most exciting aspects of the Games coming to Ireland is the launching of the School Enrichment Programme, through which pupils are actively confronted with their own misconceptions about learning disabilities. The question, "What is a learning disability?" is asked. Thanks to the programme, the schoolchildren of Ireland are discovering that "everybody and everything in the universe is equal". A film clip from the US features a presenter asking various athletes to describe what having a learning disability means to them. Their responses are fascinating. One girl with a learning disability is asked would she prefer to be stared at, or ignored? "Ignored," says the girl.

This major sporting event may still be months away, but the relentless organising goes on, as it has since 1999 when the bid was won. Hosting it will cost an estimated €37 million.

The statistics are impressive: 7,000 athletes representing 160 countries and between them speaking more than 50 languages are expected. Add to that 3,000 coaches and official delegates. Then there are a further 28,000 family members and supporters. The organisers need 30,000 volunteers - 20,000 of whom have already been recruited. If you have yet to volunteer, and are aged 18 and upwards, your services are still needed.

What can you do to help? Well, practicality is always valuable. Can you make tea? How about sandwiches? Can you speak a foreign language? Are you a doctor or a nurse or a physiotherapist? Can you drive a car? Can you muck out a stable and tack up a horse? Could you host a visiting family at your home? Do you have IT skills? Could you help maintain the Special Olympics website? Put bluntly, do you want to be part of something that will change your life?

It is a typical grey, wet winter morning. The Special Olympics headquarters at Park House on Dublin's North Circular Road is busy and cheerful. Volunteers are folding fact sheets, placing them into envelopes and bringing the stacks, some 10,000 of them, downstairs for franking and posting. Others, such as Paddy Faul, formerly of the Environmental Protection Agency and now retired, John Gallagher, a student from Belvedere College, and Denise Cremins, are answering the phones. Most of the inquiries are from aspiring volunteers, anxious to get involved.

One of the callers has just given his birth date: 1927. "He'd like to help out at Portmarnock with the golf."

No one is too old to get involved, and retired people are valuable as they have more time to offer. Bernadette Williams and Bridget Sargent, both from Crumlin and long-time friends, their children grown, are busy in the headquarters and enjoying every minute of it.

"This has brought housewives like us back into the workforce. These Olympics help everyone, even the volunteers benefit from helping."

There is a job waiting for anyone who wants to help. Each applicant must complete a volunteer application form which, in the interests of security, is processed by the Garda.

Across the office, calls are being taken and visits arranged in relation to hosting visiting families.

Marion Courtney, who had been living in France for some years, decided to return to Ireland and get involved in organising the Special Olympics. She is co-ordinating the host family project by which Irishfamilies volunteer to welcome a visiting family into their homes for the duration of the Games. To date, about 650 homes have been visited, assessed and found suitable for the task of hosting a family.

The host town aspect represents a wider, community level of the Games. This is a four-day induction programme during which the athletes, their families and supporters will be made welcome by communities across the country before moving to Dublin to concentrate on the competition.

Some 170 Irish towns applied to be considered for this. Towns from each of the 32 counties have been matched with a delegation, for example: Belfast will host the US team - the largest with 1,200 athletes; the Aran Islands will host Portugal; Skibbereen in Co Cork will host the Czech Republic; Strabane, Co Tyrone the Cayman Islands; Westport and Newport, Co Mayo will jointly host the Luxembourg team, and so on.

Abbotstown - now inevitably associated in the public consciousness with the will-it-or-won't-it-be-built football stadium - has, in the context of the Special Olympics, become a reality. In the National Aquatic Centre at Abbotstown, Ireland now has an Olympic-sized pool with substantial viewing stands for spectators.

Other venues include Morton Stadium at Santry for athletics; the cycling takes place in the Phoenix Park; gymnastics, power lifting, table tennis and bocce are scheduled for the RDS; golf at Portmarnock; yachting at the Royal St George Yacht Club; equestrian sport at Kill International Equestrian Centre in Co Kildare; football - both 11- and 5-a-side - takes to the pitches at UCD and at the University of Limerick.

Few TV and radio advertising campaigns in this country have been as evocative or as persuasive as that of the Special Olympics. All the competitors - as well as the eventual medallists - will triumph, but the real winners at this year's Special Olympics will be sport itself, and the volunteers, supporters and members of the Irish public who get involved and "share the feeling".

For more information: www.specialolympics.ie or tel: 01-8691700.

Gymnastics

Adam Morrison (21) will be one of the most senior athletes in the gymnastics competition next June. But success in gymnastics is only one in a long list of accomplishments for the Co Down man.

Recently, he became the proud recipient of a Gold Duke of Edinburgh achievement award. This involved participating in a 50-mile group survival expedition through a dense Canadian forest. As part of the award, Morrison, from Newtownards, also had to develop a new skill, and chose to play the piano. Now a keen musician, Morrison takes piano lessons every week and recently passed his grade one exams.

Morrison is the ideal weight and size for gymnastics. His mother Annabelle says he is very lucky, as most people with Down's syndrome tend to put on weight from an early age. Both Annabelle and Adam's father, Ray, play a pivotal role in his advancement. Their time is in constant demand, with the majority of his extra-curricular activities taking place about 25 minutes from their home. "We are certainly kept going," says Annabelle.

Morrison works in a supermarket two days a week and attends college for another two, where he enjoys computers and learning retail skills. Drama classes and an outing to the social club are other weekly pursuits. But it is clearly the mention of Saturday morning football and Liverpool FC that excites him the most.

Despite smilingly shaking his head when asked about any friends he has made at the gym, Morrison's parents insist there has been a very beneficial social aspect to the Games, where he has made numerous friends. The Special Olympics have also brought the threesome half way around the world.

"We were in North Carolina at the World Games in 1999," says Annabelle, and they go to Britain at least once a year for competitions.

Although Morrison will be going for gold this year, his parents believe his participation is more important than winning. It will be a momentous and emotional occasion, they add.

Golf

Kathy Davidson (25) is an all-round sportswoman. Having travelled through most of Europe as part of the Special Olympics team for a number of years, the Co Down woman has played table tennis and volleyball and was a member of the swim team at a competitive level. It is only in the last year however, that she has found her forte - golf.

In a team of 20 golfers, Davidson from Portadown has tremendous support from her coach and uncle, Philip Patterson, who trains with her once a week. She loves the sport, he says and "would play golf every day if she could".

Davidson is in training to participate in the "skills" section of the golf competition, which entails taking shots from a driving range aimed at a custom-made board similar to a darts board, according to Patterson. Her best shot is with an iron club.

To reach this level, Davidson had to win gold in the national golf competitions, which took place at Dublin's Elm Green in 2001.

Davidson attends the local school, where her interests include gardening and computers. At weekends, she also likes music and dancing, as well as watching her ultimate sporting hero, Tiger Woods.

On competition day this June, her uncle and mentor knows that Davidson will try her utmost but probably "won't realise how big the occasion is".

He says she is "one of these people who is just happy to participate. If she wins the gold she'll enjoy it, but if she wins the silver or bronze it will mean just as much."

The social aspect of the occasion will make it special for Davidson. "She'll be looking forward to the opening and closing ceremony, to see who is there and who she knows," he adds.

Basketball

Maria Brennan (29) is an experienced member of Ireland's basketball team. From Waterford city, Brennan has been playing basketball for more than 10 years, taking great pride in the team's endeavours. And she believes they have a good chance of success this June.

"We have a fair, strong team," she says.

While Brennan remains committed to her basketball, since the arrival of her son, Christopher, four years ago, her lifestyle has changed considerably.

"I spend a lot of time playing games with the child and looking after him," she says. Before, she spent more time watching basketball matches involving the local League of Ireland team and helping out with various local charities.

Brennan likes to spend any spare time solving puzzles and crosswords and working on jigsaws, and says she is "not a television person", unlike most people she knows. Until recently, Brennan worked in the kitchen at a local restaurant. When it was taken over by new management, however, she was happy to relinquish her job and become a stay-at-home mum again.

Something of a veteran to the Games, Brennan travelled to the 1995 Olympics in Connecticut. But she was unable to play in the run-up to the 1999 games due to her pregnancy.

An exceptionally brave and independent young woman, Brennan's efforts are praised by basketball coach Anne-Marie Whelan. "Maria has done fantastic so far," she says. "I've no doubt that she will continue the good work for her country this year."

According to other team members, Brennan is a great inspiration to them and will rarely miss a training session.

Maria says she is really looking forward to playing for her country again, walking out onto the court in the "Irish colours" in front of the cheering home crowd.

Áine Flynn