MARK Gilsenan is loathed to reach for the word ‘normal’. Hates it.
But in the context of what the sensory room in Cavan’s Kingspan Breffni has done for his family, there really isn’t another word that would do justice.
For most families, going to a football match is the most normal thing in the world. Thoughtless. Effortless.
The Gilsenans hadn’t been to a match together as a family in years.
Mark and Aisling’s fourth child, Daniel, has autism and is non-verbal.
Their middle two, daughter Abbi and son Sean, are football mad. So they would go to the game with Mark, and Ashling would stay home with Daniel.
When Sean was playing in an U13 league final in Breffni earlier this year, the whole clan was there, including Daniel’s grandparents.
Cavan’s sensory room is not just a room.
It’s not just the bubble lamps or the bean bags or the funboard or the soft pieces or the soft-textured walls or the tinted, triple-glazed, soundproof windows, the things you can see and feel and touch.
It is the cornerstone of a family’s relationship and their collective connection to each other and something that they love.
It is a crumb of normality in a life that can be incredibly joyous while also being incessantly demanding.
“To be able to go to games and be a family again, to have my parents there, to have Daniel there, enjoying the occasion – it’s immeasurable, really,” says Mark.
He was part of the committee that sprang into action when presented with an idea that had been brought to them by Raymond Galligan.
That’s right. The now-Cavan manager who was then the county’s captain and goalkeeper.
Just before Covid struck, Galligan opened up a day service in Rathfarnham in Dublin, where his staff cares for adults with all manner of different disabilities and challenges.
They installed a more modest sensory room there. In the course of his research around ideas to reduce the arousal for those in care caused by various factors such as light or loud noises, Galligan came to learn of a sensory room at Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium.
He brought it to county chairman Kieran Callaghan, who took it to the county’s Health and Wellbeing Committee.
Anne Fortune took it from there and ran, propelled further by the likes of Tony Ryan, Padraig Rudden and Gerard Tormey.
On Tuesday night, they were the four- person delegation representing Cavan in Old Trafford, a sort of ironic host venue for Stadium Business Design and Development Awards.
They won the Community Project Award.
Now, in award season, you’d be forgiven for allowing your eyes to glaze over as you read the one-hundredth self-congratulatory LinkedIn post of the day.
But just some context. Cavan’s sensory room was up against the 6,900m2 ‘green roof’ installed at the adidas arena in Paris, used in both Olympic and Paralympic Games this summer.
They were also up against, among other projects, Huddersfield Town FC’s remembrance garden and a community legacy project at Parque Estadio Nacional in Santiago.
“You’re trying to give opportunities to children with additional needs who might not get that opportunity otherwise,” says Fortune, whose son Luke plays with Cavan.
With Mark Gilsenan alongside her, they run the county’s Allstar committee that goes beyond a box-ticking approach to engaging people with additional needs.
They have eight hubs geographically spread to cover the whole county. They run easter and summer camps in Killygarry, then have six or eight weeks of activity before an end-of-year day in Kingspan Breffni.
The Allstars have their own jerseys with their own sponsor, and they hold a guard of honour before county finals.
Participation numbers rise all the time. They’re part of a team with their own identity.
It might be the first time they’ve ever been part of a team in their lives.
As the programme has evolved, so have its participants. Physically, mentally, behaviourally, advances Mark and Anne could never have envisaged when they started the programme.
“Daniel would have run around, maybe half an hour in one of the Easter camps. Last year he spent the whole week in it, two hours a day, four days.”
Other kids that were shy or clinging to parents have blossomed.
Disabilities are forgotten there.
It’s the human impact on a deeper level that makes these things matter.
The sensory room you see now is an enclosed box that almost looks as though it was implanted on the terrace side of the ground. It seemed to just spring up, not there one day, there the next. It cost around about €50,000, give or take.
So many different factions came together to keep that cost down, from clubs that sought grants on the county’s behalf, businesses like Kingspan and Wilton Recycling, to the workmen who did the construction end of it for nothing more than the cost of the materials.
Other counties have spoken to Cavan about it, explored the ideas, but nobody has yet taken the plunge.
It seems a mortal sin that with their inside-to-outside access, the corporate boxes in Croke Park are tailormade for a quick renovation, yet it has not yet moved on the idea. In time, it will happen, surely.
When Cavan did it, they did it right.
“You can put a room and stick a sign outside it and call it a sensory room. A room, a space, whatever. That’s not a sensory room,” says Mark Gilsenan.
They put huge thought not only to what would be in it, but what wouldn’t be.
A range of sensory toys were considered but they went against it because of the likelihood that children using the space would become attached to them and that it would be a sin to take them off them again.
That there would be different textures on the wall for those who respond to the feel of it.
Soft textured walls and surfaces. Bright pictures of animals on the walls yet the ability to effectively black out the room with curtains and lighting if things become overwhelming.
And for those bringing a child with additional needs to a game, a chance to sit outside and be part of a football match knowing that everything inside is absolutely safe.
That’s the kind of thing that only people who know really know.
Cavan’s sensory room is anything but normal.
It is one of the most impactful and thoughtful projects the GAA has ever seen. Too easy and too important not to repeat across the country.
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