200,000 people to participate in annual Darkness Into Light event

An estimated 200,000 people will take part in the annual Darkness Into Light fundraising event in the early hours of Saturday morning.

This “contagion of hope” as it has been billed attracted 400 people to the first event in 2009.

Now in its 10th year, it will embrace thousands of dawn walkers in 180 venues across the Ireland and worldwide.

The first Darkness Into Light event this year will take place in Wellington and Christchurch, New Zealand. Most events overseas will be run by Irish emigrants or those of Irish extraction living abroad.

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Darkness Into Light is Pieta House’s biggest fundraising appeal and raises more than €4 million to operate its services. Each person participating pays €25 to do the walk.

Pieta House offers counselling for those who are thinking of suicide and also consolation to families who have lost somebody to suicide.

The event begins in darkness at 4.15am, as thousands of people walk a 5 kilometre route while dawn is breaking. Funds raised from Darkness Into Light help keep Pieta House’s counselling services free for those in need of help.

Pieta House chief executive Brian Higgins has ascribed the popularity of the event to the ubiquity of suicide in society.

Some 399 people took their own lives in 2016. It is estimated that each suicide directly affects 130 people and so 50,000 people every year are impacted by these deaths.

The cumulative impact over the year, he says, is that everybody knows somebody who has died by suicide or knows somebody affected by it.

“I think we have generated a conversation about suicide and some of the causes of suicide,” he said. “There are so many people who are touched by it and the public are engaged on the issue.

“Thanks to the generosity of all our participants and supporters, all of our services remain free, but the demand for them is ever-increasing. We all need to wake up to the stigmas that lead people to the point of self-harm or suicidal crisis and subsequently to the doors of Pieta House to seek help.”

The biggest gathering will be in Dublin's Phoenix Park where it all began in 2009. An estimated 14,000 people are expected to gather there for the walk from Chesterfield Avenue into the light.

It looks like it is going to be dry across the country for the walks though showers will be heavy across the country on Saturday afternoon.