Ryder Cup golfers Padraig Harrington, Paul McGinley and Darren Clarke have lent their support to a major fundraising initiative for suicide research which was launched in Dublin last night.
The 3Ts project - Turning the Tide of Suicide in Ireland - will fund new areas of suicide research as well as support programmes for those who have lost a loved one to suicide.
It aims to raise funds by running an annual competition in every golf club on the island of Ireland for the next five years.
Regional winners will progress to a national final and golf classic, the first of which will take place at the K Club, Co Kildare, in July.
Speaking at the launch, the 3Ts scientific co-ordinator, Prof Kevin Malone of the department of psychiatry and mental health research at St Vincent's University Hospital and University College Dublin, said that over the past five years, 3,000 families "have grieved the loss of a loved one they have lost from suicide in Ireland, North and South.
"In 50 per cent of cases, those lost loved ones were less than 25 years of age, and mostly young men."It was important that we demystified and demythified suicide, without normalising it. "You commit a crime, you die by suicide," he said.
Prof Malone, while acknowledging that €8 million had been spent by the Government to combat the rise in suicide, said this translated into €2 per head of population and was a financial drop in the ocean compared with "the amount of money being rightly pumped into Ireland's second major cause of youth death, deaths on the roads".
Pointing to the success of a suicide intervention project in Hungary - where suicide rates are 40 per 100,000 people - he said a similar initiative here could save 80 lives a year.
The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention funded a programme to put trained nurse counsellors in place in one region in Hungary.
Combined with giving GPs and local psychiatrists training in suicide assessment intervention, the project achieved an 18 per cent reduction in suicide in a two-year period compared with a neighbouring region where the trial did not run.
The 3Ts project is sponsored by Holiday Inn, the K Club, the Golfing Union of Ireland and the Irish section of the Professional Golfers' Association. Funds raised will benefit a broad range of mental health charities,including Aware, Schizophrenia Ireland and the Samaritans.