Inspiring next-gen para-rowers

The European Academy of Childhood-onset Disability (EACD) annual congress in Galway was a welcome opportunity for Get Going Get Rowing to spend time with our inclusion colleagues, get inspired, and do some inspiring of our own.

At the Thursday evening seminar sharing successes in adaptive water sports, we spoke about our collaboration with St. Gabriel’s Foundation in Limerick. We’ve done adaptive on-the-water rowing camps for small groups the last three summers, and it’s led to three campers joining local rowing clubs, Get Rowing doing our Indoor PE programme with St. Gabriel’s Special School, and those athletes competing at our Munster Indoor Rowing Blitz back in March.

It was great to have pararowers Ella, from Tribesman Rowing Club, and Shane, from Castleconnell Boat Club, with us alongside Irish Paralympian, rower Katie O’Brien, who hosted the evening. We also met new friends from Irish Surfing and heard about a fabulous adaptive programme that they do in Donegal and Lahinch called Liquid Therapy.

The theme of this evening was Every 1 Counts. “The philosophy of the Every1Counts call to action is that we do some little good right now rather than dreaming about great things to do in the future,” according to EACD. “If we all make 1 meaningful and positive change to improve the quality of life of people with childhood-onset disabilities the overall change will be great.”

That’s a message we loved to hear, because it’s easy to get so wrapped up in worries about doing it wrong that maybe you wouldn’t even try to do one small thing at all.

On Saturday we then had the chance to put that into practice with a rowing taster session. We worked with children and their families to introduce the rowing stroke to them, and Katie spoke to each about the different pararowing classifications. While some of the children are too young to join rowing clubs, they certainly aren’t too young to row at a gym or at home doing an exercise that is highly adaptable to their abilities and get a great workout.

Judging by the smallies’ smiles, it’s not too much to hope that we have inspired the next generation of Irish pararowers.

In the 2025-26 school year alone, Get Rowing saw the participation of more than 2,000 athletes with additional needs over more than 160 classes across Ireland. Events like these remind us of the unquantifiable good that adaptive rowing does, and we look forward to more of the same this summer and into the next academic year.