Successful farm safety event at CBS Nenagh

A hugely successful farm safety awareness event was held at Nenagh CBS on Wednesday, December 12th.
There were lots of tears and emotions due to the graphic photos presented by Pat Griffin of the Health & Safety Authority, but also from listening to Angela Hogan tell her story of what it was like in the aftermath of losing her partner, Brendan Kelly, in a horrific farm accident and being left with two small children. 
Eugene Hogan spoke of his family's loss of their son and brother Dermot Hogan. He also played two videos from his programme, 'What's Left Behind', which left many of the audience in tears. 
Brian Rohan from the farm accident support network, Embrace Farm, told his story and of how the national network came about. Peter Gohery, also of Embrace Farm, spoke briefly on why he spends his time coming to schools to talk and to get involved with projects like this.
The five CBS students involved in the awareness project then told their story of why they wanted to organise the tractor run that was recently held around Nenagh. One of the students, Paul, lost a good friend of his last year in a farm accident; he was only 15 years old. The students wanted to spread awareness to try and stop more young people from dying on farms. 
They each spoke about the running of the event and presented an amazing video of 'Farm Health & Safety Dos and Don'ts', which they made under the guidance of their teacher, Paul Butler. They shot this over a number of days on three different farms, and quite a number of hours were spent editing it.
The HSA and Embrace Farm speakers were so impressed with the video and its high quality that they have agreed to take it on as an initiative for a schools programme. They are looking at rolling it out to other schools as a possible TY competition next year, in which schools would make a short video promoting health and safety on farms. The CBS student and teacher team were thrilled as they had mentioned this to Peter Gohery at the very start of the project and he has been behind them all the way.
The event finished with a video of the very successful tractor run, which again included highlights of the day put to music, including drone footage of the 140 tractors and Donkey from Grassmen's address to the huge crowd that attended on the day. 
After that the students presented Brian and Norma Rohan of Embrace Farm with a cheque for €7,000. All at the CBS were thrilled that their school community, which is relatively small at just over 550 students, could have achieved such a feat! While it was amazing to be able to hand over that much money to such a fantastic and worthwhile charity, they feel that the awareness they have brought, especially among young people, to the issue of taking risks on farms, has been the most brilliant thing about the whole campaign, and has made all the weeks and long evenings of work worth it. 
The team at Nenagh CBS would like to thank everyone that has supported this project along the way.