Tackling Limerick's Suicide Crisis

A Limerick-based spoken word performer by the name of Dyrt captured the mood of a city with a single, extraordinary metaphor.

He said that the emergency search and rescue helicopters – the sound of their blades can be heard throughout the city – were the “modern banshee, announcing death.”

When you hear those blades, you know that a death announcement is sure to follow...

Those words struck a bleak chord, not least because it seems like everyone in Limerick has known suicide in some way. When Hot Press meets Lucy O’Hara, volunteer and trustee for Limerick Suicide Watch, she tells me just how disturbingly prevalent the problem is.

“Just to give you a sense of it,” she begins, “I did a talk about suicide in front of a hall full of young children, and asked them to raise their hands if they’d been affected by suicide. I think all but four children put their hands up. That’s the extent of what we’re dealing with.”

Limerick Suicide Watch was established out of necessity in 2016. Since then, the number of volunteers has skyrocketed.

“We’re a voluntary charity organisation,” explains Lucy. “We patrol the banks of the River Shannon and the seven bridges around Limerick City, helping people who are in distress or maybe feeling suicidal. That’s the essence of what we do. At the moment we have 67 volunteers and 13 on probation, all Garda vetted.”

Limerick has the highest rate of suicide in the country.

“We felt we needed to do something about this,” says O’Hara. “We don’t want families getting a knock on the door at 2 or 3 in the morning, being told that their son or daughter has been found in the water. We can stop families having to suffer that heartache. At the moment we’ve had about 200+ interventions.”

Why is the city so badly affected?

“I couldn’t pinpoint the reasons exactly,” says Lucy. “There’s a lot of different backgrounds in Limerick. There’s the universities, the colleges, the developments. There’s social issues as well, like the extremely high homelessness rate and other issues related to housing. But we’ve had people from as young as 13 up to people in their 70s. It’s never just one age group or issue. It affects people from all walks of life.

“It isn’t just people with mental health issues either, although that’s a factor. We meet people who suffer from issues related to family, to drugs, to financial worries. For younger people it could be the expectations that come with peer pressure. Feeling isolated can be a big one. That can often be the cruellest one and the hardest to explain. That’s why we’re always out patrolling the city and the bridges. We say hello to everyone we meet. We want to reach out to people and communicate with them.”

WHERE DO I GO?

Limerick Suicide Watch has received extensive support from the community, with various organisations offering to fundraise for them. Lucy stresses that Limerick Suicide Watch needs to improve its effectiveness when volunteers encounter someone who has been affected by an overdose. She believes that allowing trained volunteers to carry the drug Naloxone, which reverses the effects of opioids in the case of overdose, is essential. The Mayor of Limerick has been supportive of this move. In addition, the charity is developing an app – the first of its kind – which will collate all of Limerick’s emergency services, as well as offering advice, helplines and other services.

“It’s essentially a one-stop shop for all the services in Limerick,” notes Lucy. “We were looking into it because we were always asked, ‘Where do I go and what do I do next?’ We don’t want to just help people in the immediate moment, we want them to know that there’s lots of options. So we started looking into organisations related to mental health, or drug recovery, or homelessness, and how we can put the information for all these groups together. There’s been nothing like this in the country before, but it’s very easy to use. There’s a section called health and services and it gives you brief information and a list of services. It also has places of interest in Limerick, to get people out of the house, and let them know that there’s things to do.”

For more information, visit limericksuicidewatch.ie