Emma McGuire and Donna Conroy, Course Co-ordinators:

Emma: I suppose Coronavirus has affected the women’s group in the fact that they’ve lost all their routine and their get-a-way, getting a bit of a break from their young children. Myself and Donna found it quite hard to engage sometimes with the women through zoom chats and over the internet. It was quite hard to get the women to engage at one time.

Donna: I think it was just very, very difficult for us as coordinators to try and coordinate a project that is so socially involved, and we’re trying to do it through social media, and it just wasn’t working out with the women and the kids and the different times that we were putting up just didn’t suit them, it was quite difficult. I think the biggest thing for us was the lack of routine and our group would be based around a routine every Tuesday morning, every Wednesday morning. And more so than anything, it’s the social interaction of the women together. I think they miss that an awful lot, and I just think that our routine in general was really disrupted. It was quite hard to communicate with them online.

I think to be honest, more than anything, the routine is vital for our women, because I think it gives them, stability in their life. I think that coming here every Wednesday and every Tuesday, they would have felt isolated in the community and coming here makes them feel part of a community, you feel part of a family. I think that’s what we have gained in the last three years of being here that they literally feel involved in the community they were they were so isolated beforehand.

In the last three years we’ve seen that they’ve literally gained so much self-confidence and a lot of the girls see our courses, a stepping-stone that leads into further education and further employment. A lot of our girls always just lacked self-confidence and I think this course has given them that initiative to feel that they can go on into full time education or part time education or part time or full-time employment.

So basically, we set up in 2017, backed by the International Fund for Ireland with the initiative of getting a group of women together from the community that felt isolated, and were very, very alone in their homes. That would have been from young mums and lone parents. Our course was aimed as a stepping-stone, to get these girls back into some sort of an education. Some of the girls did not have a Leaving Cert or Junior certs, they fell out of school quite early. They literally wanted to better themselves.

But the most important thing I think, the most vital thing is to have self-confidence, to do that and have self-belief. I think a lot of our girls lack that and more than anything, that is what our course has been about, for them to gain that self-confidence and self-belief. The amount they have come on, the development of themselves and their personalities has been phenomenal in the last three years. We would have seen girls that wouldn’t have spoken out, they were just so shy, and they were just withdrawn in themselves. Now they are literally leaders within their own groups and it’s just fantastic to see.

Emma: It’s wonderful to watch them grow and make new friends and train themselves up in things that they’re interested in, different courses such as beauty courses, DIY skills, it was just lovely to watch the girls excel true the few years. One of our biggest fears was because of this gap that we’ve had, we haven’t had interaction with them, that they would have fallen to the wayside but to see them all here today is phenomenal. It really is. It’s great. It’s just great to see that they still want to be here and how much they enjoy it.

NOW THEY ARE LITERALLY LEADERS WITHIN THEIR OWN GROUPS AND IT’S JUST FANTASTIC TO SEE