GIVE TO GOAL THIS CHRISTMAS
GOAL volunteer and secondary school teacher Tiernan Dolan is not a man who likes to be told to slow down and as the festive season approaches he would like to appeal to you to think of those less fortunate than yourselves.
Tiernan likes to be in the thick of the action and has been for over fifteen years, but a few short months ago, was forced to take stock and confront his own mortality when he suffered a mild heart attack.
Today he’s a changed man, exercising religiously and having a cup of coffee without his customary accompanying bun– and he feels all the better for it. “My brother had a triple bypass done some years ago and though I wasn’t exactly expecting my heart scare I felt I was next in a way, it wasn’t a huge surprise.”
Tiernan’s long-standing association with GOAL, which celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year, began in the early nineties when he offered his skills as an amateur photographer and was invited on a fund-raising trip to Sudan. “John O’Shea of GOAL said I could be opening a door that I could not close and that door is not off its hinges,” he laughs. “That door was opened over in Sudan and that trip was an incredible experience. It changed my outlook forever and I never imagined that I’d still be working with them all these years later.
“You can see the images on television and on video but seeing them in reality is quite another experience. You don’t get to see, taste or smell it until you’ve been there, you don’t get the sounds or to interact with the people, to hear their stories and see first-hand, it’s totally mind-blowing and it changes you for the better.”
Tiernan has been on fourteen overseas trips with GOAL, from Afghanistan to Angola, Sudan to Darfur. Admitting that the scenes witnessed are utterly heartrending, Tiernan stresses that each and every trip abroad with GOAL is nothing less than “an absolute privilege” and he is all too aware that many more yearn to be in his place.
Recently, Tiernan was sadly bereaved by both parents and in their memory has asked people to contribute to his latest mission. Tiernan is currently involved in building six houses in Uganda for families orphaned by AIDS, at a cost of just €3,500 per house. “It’s a great project,” he says enthusiastically. “I visited the region last year just to see the set-up and to visit one family who are getting a house and I asked the woman there would it make a difference to her to get this house and she smiled and said “it’s not a house, it’s a palace.”
That says it all, the work of GOAL and the work of people like Tiernan Dolan who make it happen.
If you’d like to make a donation to GOAL, please send your contribution to GOAL Ireland:
PO Box 19, Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin or make a credit/ Laser donation by phoning 012809779.