The Liberator
When our feet hurt, we hurt all over -Socrates
When Grettie from Grealish Town
soaked and clipped -
you talked. You'd tell her things
you kept from the priest.
At first there were doubts
about this whippersnapper
who worked in the hat factory.
What would she know
about stubborn old nails?
But the toenail gang knew her unflappable touch.
She would tuck cotton wool soaked in antiseptic
under an untameable bucko and deliver him.
You'd feel nothing more than her coaxing gaze
calling for more story more story.
Rita Ann Higgins's poem could have been written for Eiblin Mahon. Eiblin's 40 volunteers in the remote mountain regions of Donegal's Inishowen Peninsula might not actually have delivered a stubborn toenail, but they do deliver old people from wretched loneliness.
"Is this the organisation that visits people?" asks a sprightly old voice on the telephone. "It is," says Eiblin. "Well, I would like a visit," says the caller. The desperation behind such an appeal, says Eiblin, is barely imaginable.
Soon a volunteer will be on the doorstep to begin the journey to trust and friendship, from which great adventures can flow. "One of our volunteers took an old lady shopping last year and that was the woman's first time ever in Derry, though it's only 14 miles up the road from her. And they went by bus . . ." The more mundane trips are to the local shops to get the messages or to visit a husband's grave.
What Eiblin's crew does is "befriend". It's not about washing and cleaning, a service for which home helps are contracted. But it does have a highly practical strand. The volunteers are trained in everything from first aid and resuscitation to security, computers and conquering the euro. And their visits are treasured beyond words. "There's one wee man who's waiting at the door if his volunteer goes one minute past the hour she's expected."
It's a long way from Inishowen to the city streets of the capital, but the anticipation of a friendly voice is just as intense. Every night in Dublin, a couple of volunteers from the Ruhama Women's Project hit the streets in a van. Their beat is wherever women working in prostitution are to be found.
In cold, dark, troubled hours, women will climb up into that warm little oasis of friendship and dignity, to have a hot drink and a chat; and - in the words of 28-year-old volunteer Stephanie O'Keeffe - "be just whoever they are . . . We don't judge them, we have no expectations of them. It's amazing what can happen over a cup of coffee; their body language changes completely and they can relax and talk about the things that are going on in their lives . . . There's a real engagement, and in spite of the context, right there and then, that's a very lovely thing . . . I think every woman would love to stay in the van chatting to us - if they didn't need to get back out and earn £250. You can tell, because the moment they step outside again, you can see them toughening up, getting back in character."
Once a woman asks for follow-up support, Ruhama swings into action. From advocacy with official agencies to helping her set up a legitimate business, from one-to-one classes to simply befriending her, Ruhama's reach is broad and deep, but it can happen only with the help of its 35 volunteers.
Elsewhere in Dublin's north city, if it's Friday, 15-year-old Niall Bradley will be heading for the club in St Michael's House, in Raheny. As in any youth club, he might have a game of snooker, or get down to a board game. But this is a club with a difference. It's run by Grange Kildonagh Integration (GKI), with the objective of integrating young people with disabilities with their able-bodied peers.
Its chairwoman is Elaine Teague, a grown-up who began with GKI when she was 14. Niall has been going since he was eight, toddling behind his three maternal uncles. Like many who grew up in a volunteering family, he's doesn't really think of himself as a volunteer. "I never felt like a volunteer. I was just going there as one of the children and when I became an honorary helper at 13, I just saw it as a step-up . . . It's not that I'd have a whole lot else to do on a Friday night anyway," he says ruefully. Niall's two friends, Lynn Gough and Conor Barry, are also Friday night regulars. This family/friendship route into becoming a volunteer is a recurring feature. Lynn's sister was a helper with his uncle Keith. Conor is his pal. GKI has 40 volunteers, all under 18. But many "old" boys and girls still return to devote their holidays to the month-long summer project.
Grβinne Dunne is also a bit embarrassed to hear herself described as a volunteer. A teacher at St Corban's boys' national school in Naas, Co Kildare, she set up the choir there in 1998. In three years, she has achieved the mighty feat of making after-school choir cool for boys. "The lads are the volunteers," she insists. "No-one is beating them into it at the beginning, but they know that once they start, they must be committed for the year."
Her love of music radiates from her, but that's only the beginning. "That commitment they make is hugely important. I really feel children get out of a lot of things these days - 'he quit' is a big thing. But they're like sponges at this age; this is when they establish core values. These kids stop their parents going away for weekends because they have choir. They're just great lads."
It began with the boys who weren't into sport; now the numbers have doubled to 80 and it's the place to be.
A few weeks ago, the National Committee on Volunteering (NCV) invited them to sing at the unveiling of a sculpture by the Taoiseach, and there was some consternation when the organisers realised there were 80 of them. Too late. The teacher held out, says Marguerite Bourke of the NCV; it was all or none. That's because Grβinne Dunne has seen how one hour a week can turn a child's life around.
"I can think of one child who wasn't particularly academic or sporty, but the choir has given him a sense of 'this is what I'm good at'. It's made for him. It has given him a sense of identity and he is respected for it - a respect that was badly needed among his peers."
Only scratch the veneer and it seems that the country is underpinned by volunteers, that great mass of extraordinary people who operate as "the eyes and ears of society, the polyfilla for the gaps that the State can't reach or see", in the words of Bourke. At Our Lady's Hospice, Harold's Cross, Dublin, Olive Skerritt, the volunteer co-ordinator, marshals an army of 270, a cohort drawn from bankers and barristers, schoolteachers to factory workers and domestic staff, all giving freely and generously of their time and skills. They take on everything - from feeding patients and wheeling them to Mass, taking them shopping or running the hospice shop, to playing the piano and walking the resident Labrador.
At Barnardos, the child and family support group, Angela Walsh co-ordinates another army of 135. (She also happens to be Niall Bradley's mother). They work with children, or in the Barnardos shops, or help with fund-raising. At ACCORD, (formerly the Catholic Marriage Advisory service), men and women give entire mornings, evenings and weekends to counselling work that is difficult, draining and often depressing.
And this doesn't even begin to cover it. At least a third of the population is engaged in volunteering. Some 2,000 voluntary organisations have been in touch with the NCV in the eight months of its existence, according to its co-ordinator, Helen Lahert.
For study purposes, Freda Donoghue, of the Centre for Non-Profit Management at Trinity College, applied an average wage to volunteer labour. She discovered that volunteers were worth about £471m a year to the Irish economy (and that's based on six year-old-data). Add that to the £3.3bn a year contributed by the voluntary and community bodies and it makes the sector a bigger contributor than agriculture or fishing.
It shouldn't be surprising, as Donoghue points out, that Ireland's volunteering movement can be traced back to the strong tradition of Protestant philanthropy from the late 1700s. The Catholic clergy entered the field in the 1830s, and later when the rigidly-enforced Poor Laws left many people without cover, the religious orders stepped in. Several of their voluntary hospitals are in action to this day.
Community volunteering was there in the form of the meitheal, where the community organised to assist each farmer in turn, making the community self-sufficient and reliant. The co-operative movement - now a billion-pound industry - was a more institutionalised form of that. Muintir na T∅re was built on the self-sufficient local parish as the basis of its organisation, a model discernible in more contemporary urban community development where communities, galvanised by social issues such as drugs, unemployment and deprivation become more formalised and structured.
But volunteering is also about a sense of identity, says Donoghue. The Gaelic League and the GAA have their roots in promoting "Irish" activities, while contributing to a sense of community and belonging.
Government policies in the early years of the State also boosted volunteering, for all the wrong reasons. Policies based on the principle of subsidiarity, derived from Catholic teaching, held that responsibility for social issues lay with the basic units of family and parish; only when these were seen to fail could the State step in as a last resort. The gaps were deep and wide.
The gaps may not be so catastrophic today but voluntary organisations continue as society's eyes and ears, illuminating dark corners, bringing dignity, inclusion, hope, confidence and fun into hundreds of thousands of lives.
While some of the more venerable organisations might be struggling to replace an ageing cohort or forced to review their strategy in a rapidly-changing society, the sector is also buzzing with organisations established to meet new needs, or determined to meet old needs in a different, more empowering way.
Take the Vincentian Partnership for Social Justice, which works to get marginalised people out to vote and recognise the power they hold; or Motor Sport/Cavan Drugs Awareness, run by a bunch of motorsport enthusiasts, which aims to catch teenagers at an early age and replace the buzz of alcohol and drugs with the buzz of the race track; or Men Overcoming Violence (MOVE), which empowers violent men to examine their own behaviour.
Some major businesses are in there, quietly making a difference. National Irish Bank, Guinness and Intel all made submissions to the NCV, offering to release staff as volunteers. It might be a landscape gardener, seconded to build a tactile garden for visually-impaired children, or a computer programmer, lent out for a few days a month to set up or clean up a website.
According to polls, this nation perceives itself to have grown significantly less generous in the past 20 years and studies on volunteering carried out between 1992 and 1998 appear to confirm this. Data collated by Freda Donoghue show that in those six years, numbers fell by about 5 per cent overall.
But hidden in there are some intriguing details. For example, 41 per cent of women were volunteering in 1992; by 1998, that figure had dropped by just 1 per cent. But for men, 37 per cent of whom were volunteering in 1992, the drop was 9 per cent.
At Our Lady's Hospice, about 15 per cent of the volunteers are men. Four of Eiblin Mahon's 40-strong crew are men. At Barnardo's, only a "handful" are men.
Olive Skerritt at the hospice mulls over it for a moment: "I think it's because men are out working all the time and are more into the golf . . .," she concludes indulgently. But many of her women are in full-time jobs too.
Another gloomy perception of the decade is that youth participation has dropped off the scale. In fact, it remained static at 31 per cent - which was the lowest to begin with across the age groups.
But by 1998, the lowest participators were those aged 60-plus, who were down to about 25 per cent. This compares to 48 per cent participation in the 50-59 age group. And though 40- to 49-year-olds continued to put in a respectable showing at 41 per cent, they also showed the most dramatic drop at 10 per cent. Could this group also comprise the newest, keenest converts to golf? Just asking.
Also worth examining is the fact that the higher the household income and socio-economic status of the respondent, the more likely he or she is to be a volunteer. Nearly half of all volunteers had a third-level qualification. Those least likely to get involved were unemployed, unskilled young men. One interpretation of this is that those on lower incomes lack either the social networks that lead to volunteering (an important route for both women and men), the organisational route (bigger for men), or the self-confidence that allows them to believe they can help others.
A dearth of research means we don't have an answer to this, nor do we know why only 19 per cent of people volunteered in the north-east of the State while the figure for the south-east was a massive 56 per cent. Or why the gender imbalance that glared out of every other region was miraculously absent in the south-east, where it was a cool 50/50.
What makes the south-east so special? Then again, these figures are several years old and anecdotal evidence suggests something new and unaccounted for may be bubbling under the world of volunteering.
"It doesn't seem to us that volunteering is in decline; it may be just that people aren't volunteering for the traditional organisations anymore," says Helen Lahert, co-ordinator of the NCV. "For example, there's an immigrant support organisation in Cork which can hardly cope with the number of volunteers."
The organisation is NASC, which works to help asylum seekers/immigrants find their own voices and provides English classes, legal information (five lawyers), welfare advice and an advocacy service among many others.
Its submission to the NCV revealed that so great were the numbers coming forward to volunteer that "soon after our establishment, we needed to employ a volunteer co-ordinator to assist us . . . We have had approximately 80 active volunteers who are involved in a number of areas," wrote its co-ordinator, Brendan Hennessy. He also pointed out that a new national network of asylum, refugee and immigrant organisations now has nearly 100 members, of which about half are new. Not only does this suggest that Irish people are no less likely to volunteer, but that Ireland might not be such a hostile place to immigrants after all.
This movement is right in line with trends in enlightened welfare states, such as Denmark where, in data compiled by Joe Larragy
Continued on Weekend 2
The National Committee on Volunteering 01 814 6104
www.iyv2001-ncvireland.org
The Volunteer Resource Centre - 01 872 2622
www.volunteeringireland.com