Let's hear it for our wonderful volunteers

Volunteers are great. They add so much to the life of our region. They are the show-up, can-do kind of people that every place needs to feel vibrant and alive. They do their own work, care for their own, and then go out and do more work to try and develop their community. That work should be acknowledged, and the individuals who do it personally celebrated, not least because we need more of them and they are increasingly hard got.

All across the West those people are working away, supporting our communities and developing the young people in them. They all share a common mission: to make the place they live a nice place to grow up and a lovely place to grow old.

At this time of year they are especially busy, organising events and putting them on. The big focus this week in Ballina will of course be the Salmon Festival. There will be plenty in this newspaper about it, this week and next. The same spirit will drive the Coillte Come Home Festival, happening later this week and into the weekend in my hometown of Kiltimagh. We will see it later in the summer in the Bonniconlon Show. The same will happen all summer in towns and villages across our region.

All those festivals and events are an important vehicle for the passing on of tradition and for keeping our communities proud and united. Every one of them is driven by volunteers, who put the energy behind them and make them work year in year out. Those people are making sure we all come together as communities to celebrate, passing these things from generation to generation, nurtured by pride of place.

As anyone will tell you, it is easy to volunteer opinions. These people do more than talk. They do. When you are at one of the events in Ballina or Kiltimagh this week they will be making sure it all runs smoothly, and safely. There is a lot of work to it. And if you doubt that, that is because you have never done it.

At Coillte Come Home this weekend, Kiltimagh will fill with 'Coilltes' old and new. The town will have a buzz about it. And it will all happen because of a bunch of dedicated volunteers.

Those people will be zipping around the town in advance, making arrangements and tidying things up. On the day of each event, they will be there, making sure that each one runs smoothly and then tidying up after. They will be the stewards, the organisers, the problem solvers. We will hope for good weather and at the same time, they will be the people who have spent weeks making plans in case it rains. They will keep their – and our – spirits up if it does. If a child gets lost or an older person gets confused, they will be on hand to help. If some person insists on parking in a spot that will create no end of hassle, they will defuse it, with patience and with tact.

And that volunteering spirit isn’t just visible in the summer. Some of the best volunteering heroes we have in our communities are those who organise the card games or the social club in winter, or who coach the teams of young people in all sorts of weather. We see it at funerals all the time, where volunteers show up, and carry those of us who most need it. You will not be surprised to learn that many of the same people doing those things in winter also have the bibs on at the summer events.

The good that such things do cannot be understated. For young people, the benefits of all that volunteering is obvious: everyone wants our young people to look up and not down when they go out into the world. Volunteers in our community, and in our sports and youth clubs are helping them to do that every day. For older people, making sure they stay connected and engaged and active is the work of angels. The people who open the hall, make the tea, and make sure the public liability is sorted and all the rest make that happen.

The benefits of volunteering to a community are not just confined to those individual benefits to people or in the organising of an enjoyable event. Taken together, the work of volunteers can also unite a place, bringing people together and making it a generally more attractive community to live in. We saw that in Ballina 2023 where the town stood proud and its people engaged with one another through the wide range of events which brought it to life.

For sure, volunteering isn’t all sweetness and light though. We all know that people work so hard now that finding time to volunteer is a real and demanding commitment, often at the end of a long day or week. Many people like to do the work but don’t love committees, where there can be a lot of talking and things can become divided. The massive growth in public expenditure over the last decade has also fostered a culture that suggests that the state should do - and pay for - everything and anything that happens in a community. That can sap the energy needed.

We also know that getting involved in anything too often invites criticism, which can be especially hard to take from people who have never volunteered an hour to anything in their life. That has been made worse by the digital world. When people retreat into their online communities and become disconnected from the actual one they live in, they are not only not taking part, they can find it all too easy to give out about everything from the sidelines.

But all of that is a reason to double down in the praise for volunteers and the volunteering spirit behind them. Whether it is in Ballina or Kiltimagh or elsewhere this week, it is good to remember and recognise that the work that goes into organising these events is enormous.

The praise needs to be frequent, especially when the criticism is too often cheap. So first of all, come out and support the events in the coming days and weeks. And while you are there, it would be well worth a moment to pause and just say thank you to those people who are working hard to make it all happen. However busy they are, no one you say it to will be sorry to hear it. And who knows, next year you might be in one of those bibs yourself.