SEVEN men killed themselves in the space of just two years in a small town in Ireland.
Publican Colm Farrell knew every one of them.
The distraught father-of-three, who ran a bar in Tuam, Co. Galway at the time, decided he had to do something to help the young Irish men who were choosing death over facing the issues they were struggling with in their lives.
“There was a high incidence of suicides in Tuam in the noughties and I would have known probably every single one of them,” he told The Irish Post.
“It’s a small town of only about 9,000 people and there was probably seven suicides in the space of two years back then. I was in the pub business so knew most people around town and would have known of all them all.”
However the loss of one of those men is particularly poignant when Colm recalls that time.
“He was my friend,” he explained.
“I was talking to the man just hours before he took his own life. There was no explanation for why it happened. That was the strange thing about of it. He was talking to me beforehand and he was trying to tell me I think. I just wasn’t picking up on it.”
He adds: “He was telling me he wasn’t feeling well, and I was telling him ‘what are you talking about, you have everything you could want, a big house, two cars, a lovely wife and kids’. That wasn’t the issue of course, but I wasn’t picking up on it.
“I told him go home and I’ll meet you tonight for a pint. But that never happened because he went away and killed himself.”
Soon after Colm decided to do something to help deal with the scourge of suicide that was blighting Ireland more generally which he had seen raise its ugly head again and again in his hometown.
Fundraisers are a vital support for the Stamp out Suicide service“You don’t realise there are so many reasons why people take their own life, marriage breakdown, financial reasons, so many different things,” he said.
“It was all men who took their life in Tuam at that time and the statistics remain that the majority of suicides in Britain and Ireland are suicides of men between the ages 25 and 36.
“I wanted to do something to help, to change something about the situation. So I first started raising money for an Irish charity.”
Colm set himself a challenge, to walk across every county in Ireland to raise funds for the Console charity. He completed that walk in 2013 and decided to continue it by then walking across every county in England, Scotland and Wales in that same year.
When he finally finished up he had raised an impressive £100,000 for Console, a charity which has since been wound up, after becoming the focus of a spending scandal concerning its founder earlier this year.
Colm has remained in Britain ever since he made that cross-country journey, now living in Warrington and working in Leeds.
And he has continued in his mission to tackle suicide by establishing the nationwide counselling service Stamp out Suicide.
The organisation offers telephone counselling for anyone feeling suicidal.
“From my experience having met so many families with experience of suicide and others who I have met who had survived suicide attempts, the biggest issue they all said they faced was access to counselling. For many reasons, maybe availability, cost, lots of reasons, that was the issue,” he said.
“So when one of the people who supported my walk in Leeds offered to fund a service which I could set up, it seemed like the right thing to do,” he explained.
“Now we have a service where if somebody is feeling suicidal they send a text to our number, they get a call back from me and I will chat with them for a while. I ask them would they like to go onto counselling and so far, since we started, anyone who wanted to go on counselling would be in touch with one of our counsellors within 24 hours of taking their first call.”
“The service means we can actually take calls from all over the world and our counsellors can be based anywhere in Britain too,” he added.
Regarding the people they help, he explained: “We have six clients at the moment, people who are on our books. Our clients stay on our books for 18 weeks, that’s how long we can offer counselling for.
“After that point they would be pointed into the right direction for any further treatment or services they might need, they would basically be referred by our counsellors.”
The organisation, which has counsellors based in Wakefield, Pontefract, Glasgow and Leeds, is now hoping to gain charity status.
It must raise £5,000 to do so and a number of fundraising initiatives have been taking place in order to help them reach their goal.
“We are looking for charitable status. We need £5,000 in the bank account to achieve it, which we have had before, but we have spent the money previously raised on the service, so we need to fundraise to that amount.”
He added: “We hope to raise the money as soon as possible to get that status.”
To donate or offer your support for the service click here
