My name is Mark Brennan.

I am a project leader with Barnardos Millbrook Child & Family Services project in Tallaght, Dublin. I was with you all at the weekend for the survival event – I was put in a team with two wonderful ladies, Aisling & Caroline, and I couldn’t have asked for nicer teammates!

I am writing to thank you all for raising a significant amount of money, and subjecting yourselves to 24 hours of deprivation and hardship, for Barnardos. I really wanted to write to acknowledge and thank you for your efforts and to give you an insight into what your fundraising means to a service like mine. It was very impressive to see so many people willing to put themselves through so much hardship on behalf of others!

In my project in Tallaght we provide early years and family support services. We have a bus that collects up to 21 children aged 2-5 years daily to attend our targeted early years and preschool service. We also provide family support for the families of these children. All of the children have been referred to us – by Tusla social workers, HSE nurses, mental health services, homeless services and by parents themselves.

We work with children affected by a range of adversities including neglect, homelessness, unregulated parental mental health, parental substance misuse, domestic violence, and a range of other issues that can have serious negative impacts on children’s development.

As well as working with children, we provide a range of supports to their parents in order to build their parenting capacity and assist them to better understand and meet their children’s needs. We have a particular understanding of trauma and the impact it has on wellbeing. A focus of our work is to help parents and children to understand and regulate their emotional and behavioural responses as appropriate when they are faced with challenging sensory inputs or experiences.

I was struck throughout the 24 hour challenge at how many parallels I could identify between our survival experience and the experiences of so many children that we work with in Barnardos. At times we all suffered cold, hunger, despair, helplessness, frustration and a sense of hopelessness. Many of us even experienced the brutal cold of the river! In my 16 years with Barnardos I have worked with children who have experienced all of the above.

After the river experience I thought about two little twin girls aged 2 we had worked with, who had been left in a bath alone for so long that the water had turned cold. Luckily they stayed awake and above the water, but were almost hypothermic when they were found. As our hunger increased throughout the day I also thought a lot about the many 3 and 4 year old children I’ve known who asked us for food to bring home, or who we knew were going door to door to their neighbours begging for food. Food poverty is a real issue for many children, and is something we work with their parents to resolve.

Being deprived of watches and phones and not knowing what time it was – “it’s ten past!” was a challenge for all of us. It made me think of so many families that we work with where routine and consistency are lacking, and where time doesn’t have the same importance or relevance – these are children who don’t have a routine dinner time, or bed time, or even a set time to get up in the mornings.

I was also particularly struck by the demands for compliance being made of us – “stand up, sit down, lie down, walk forward, don’t speak” and so on. I see this so much in our work – children who have no control over the decision being made for them by the adults in their lives, or parents who don’t know where they will get to sleep the next night, or next week. They are at the mercy of others. Experiencing this sense of not having choice for just a short time at the weekend really drove home how difficult it must be for those who constantly feel that they have no choice, or control, over their situations.

However one thing I do see plenty of in the families we work with is resilience. The instinct to keep carrying on, despite the most difficult of circumstances. And I was very impressed to see you all doing the same, just gritting your teeth and ‘getting on with it’ even as you fought the urge to just give up, or give in!

The money you have raised goes towards funding services such as mine. The breakfasts and dinners we provide, and our cook Mary who makes them, our bus service and our driver Gwen, our team of early years educators and project workers, all of the materials and equipment we use, the resources we share with families – it all has to be funded.

And your efforts are what makes this possible for us. When we dress a child who arrives in without appropriate clothing, when they use our sensory room and equipment, when they choose a book from the library in their room, or take down a puzzle or board game from the shelf, when they choose dress up clothes or want to go outside to the garden to use the bicycles or slide – all of this is what your fundraising goes towards.

I only had the pleasure to meet you all for a fleeting 24 hours at the weekend, but you all most definitely left a strong impression on me – none of us found the event easy, but you all found the resilience to struggle though and were willing to put yourselves through such hardship in order to raise funds for others.

Perhaps we will all meet again at a future event, it would be an honour to go through all that with you again!