How Alan Kerins’s charity work is bringing out the best of goodwill in the GAA

What took Alan Kerins to Africa in the first place is not important now. All that matters is how it made him feel and what it made him do. In late 2004, through an accidental network of contacts, he was introduced to Sister Cathy Crawford, an inexhaustible nun from Laois who ran a rehabilitation centre for disabled children in western Zambia.

Kerins was a physiotherapist by profession and Sister Cathy was looking for people with his expertise, but this wasn’t a simple exchange of labour: when you went, you lent your whole self. Kerins had been shown photographs of buildings at the compound that were in a state of disrepair, so before he left Ireland he raised €10,000. When he arrived he saw a different picture.

The region was in the grip of a calamitous drought and the crops had failed. Sister Cathy was trying to feed 800 families with bags of milled maize. From that ration they would eat a meal every second day and go hungry before the month was out. The money that Kerins brought was ploughed into food; the buildings could wait.

While Kerins was there a sibling of one of the staff members in the rehab centre was dying of Aids. Sister Cathy took him to visit her, deep in the bush. The woman’s condition had deteriorated sharply by then and Sister Cathy promised to come back with a Jeep to take her to the hospital. By the time they returned she had died.

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The Jeep was now a hearse and Sister Cathy was the undertaker. In life and death she was immersed in the community she served. For three months, Kerins was a stunned witness.

“I was blown away by her,” Kerins says now. “She was trying to run a home with 75 kids in her care, she was trying to run social projects, she was trying to make thousands of people self-sufficient by sinking wells that allowed them to grow their own food. She needed money, and she had no money. But she wanted to become independent and not donor dependent. She was very entrepreneurial in spirit.”

After three months Kerins returned to Ireland but he knew he hadn’t left Mongu or Sister Cathy. He wondered how he could stay involved; she asked him to raise €5,000 so that they could sink a deep well. For farming to stand a chance they needed dependable access to water.

Kerins reached that target and kept going. There were more visits. His bond with the place and its people grew stronger, and in the workings of that relationship he was changed.

“In 2005, 2006, 2007, around that time, was the biggest transformation in me. That was my ignition moment, in terms of how I changed as an individual. It was a fork in my life. It made me look at myself. ‘What am I doing?’ It totally changed my outlook. I challenged my values, I challenged my priorities in life. What’s important? What’s not important? A lot of people sleepwalk through life and don’t achieve what they can achieve. I didn’t sleepwalk through life any more.”

On Friday Kerins will lead a party of about 60 people on a 10-day trip to Kenya. Most of them are Gaelic games players who answered his invitation to participate in the Plant the Planet Games. Just like the first trip a year ago, intercounty players from all four codes will play exhibition matches and, according to the tagline, “plant a million trees.”

That needs some explaining. Everyone on the trip made a commitment to raise at least €10,000. With the aid of that half a million euro, a million trees were planted across eight African countries by Self Help Africa. During their trip next week the players will spend time planting trees on local farms, but it will be symbolic of the work their money will do.

“Every tree represents a livelihood. The families and schools that get these trees will own them and will be given a lot of technical support by Self Help Africa in how to live off these trees. They’ve been doing this for 15 years. It ensures that farmers with small holdings can grow themselves out of poverty.

“Some of the players that came last year went a lot over the 10 grand. What they’re doing is action, it’s not tokenistic. I’m a great believer that people want to make a difference but they don’t always know how to do it, or they put it on the long finger – you know the way life is. The players that came last year might never have raised 10 grand without this opportunity. If you can create really good action people will follow and people will jump on.”

Kerins didn’t know any of this at the start. He didn’t know where his first trip to Africa would lead him. Nothing changed suddenly. He went back to his day job and resumed his place on the Galway hurling team. The other stuff was like the second hand on old fashioned clock, moving all the other hands.

In 2008 he put Alan Kerins Projects on a formal footing as a charity. The money that was flooding in demanded a governance structure and a legal framework. A benefactor from Kerry offered to pay a portion of his wages and he took the plunge. At the end of that year he was dropped from the Galway panel.

“I was in Zambia at the time. I didn’t get any notification. I remember Damien Joyce [former Galway captain] was out there with me and he was going home. I heard that Mark [Kerins’ brother] had been called back in with a few of the Clarinbridge lads and no letter came to me. I knew I was gone. I was distraught. It was a lonely place, that month in Zambia, twisting and turning, wondering what to do.

“I never asked [why I was dropped]. The perception would have been that I was too heavily involved in the charity work, and it was too big, and I was distracted.”

Over the next three years Kerins was recalled to the panel twice in midseason and released twice. The Galway hurlers played 15 championship games in that time and he started just two of them; between 1997 and 2008 he had missed just two championship games out of 38. His choices had taken him in another direction.

In the recession caused by the banking collapse every charity struggled. The ones that suffered most had an overseas focus. “You had to work 10 times harder to bring in 10 times less. It was a huge struggle to keep our projects going – even though we did.”

By 2015 he needed to re-evaluate. At that stage they were supporting projects in eight African countries. Over the years they had raised about €5 million by reaching out to the public in various inventive ways, and the same amount again from institutional donors. But to Kerins it felt like they had reached a ceiling.

“I did a strategic review of the organisation and I suppose I was the biggest strength but I was also by far and away the biggest weakness – because everything had to come through me. To attract bigger funding you needed a bigger organisation. That year [2015] we merged with Self Help Africa, who had a similar ethos to us. They had access to bigger donors. When you’re a one-man band, your capacity to manage big donations would be seen as a risk.

“I was wrecked from it. I was burnt. For the sustainability of myself – mentally, emotionally, physically, family-wise – and the sustainability of the projects it was the best move. Our little guy Ruadhan was very sick in hospital too at the time – critically ill – and I wasn’t able to do anything. I had to focus on him and my family.”

Ruadhan spent the first five months of his life in Temple Street Hospital before undergoing an operation in Manchester that Kerins described as “a miracle.” The surgeon thought they would need to remove 95 per cent of his pancreas, and in the end they only took 5 per cent. That difference was transformative.

Kerins returned to work. The projects in Africa carried on, but the funding model continued to evolve. He approached big companies with a proposal: instead of making a charitable donation, where the best outcome for them was the goodness of giving, he would make that donation work. He would take their senior leaders for 10-day programmes that were unlike anything he had experienced before.

Africa, Kerins says, “strips people to the core. You have limited amounts of phone and email. When people are in that space they’re open to the big questions. ‘What am I doing? Am I doing what I want to do?’

“[In other groups] I’ve seen people come home and leave jobs that they hate. I’ve seen people come home and grab life by the balls, I suppose.”

For support, Kerins often turned to GAA people. At the height of the recession he devised an All-Ireland final day experience, recreating it like a Florida theme park. The fantasy footballers who had bought a ticket ate a prematch meal in Dáil Éireann and were brought to Croke Park by Garda escort.

Shirts with their names on the back were waiting in the dressingroom. Michael O’Muircheartaigh did the match commentaries for the DVD and that night there was a mocked-up Sunday Game and a gala dinner. The event sparkled with celebrity guests. Kerins reckons it made about €100,000 in the first year, while the economy was still on its knees, and up to a quarter of a million in year four. It was ingenuous.

His mind teems with ideas. “Too many ideas. It cripples me at times to see them through, but I get excited by big ideas.” The first two editions of Plant the Planet Games were scuppered by the pandemic, but it is rolling now. Finding 50 volunteers was a massive challenge, and getting if off the ground was a “logistical beast,” but last year was a triumph.

Niamh O’Sullivan, the Meath footballer, had just six weeks notice and still raised the money. Libby Coppinger, the Cork dual player, missed the camogie All-Stars dinner; her father accepted the trophy in her place. She’s going again this year. Kerins saw a picture on social media last weekend of the Tyrone footballer Conor Meyler and the former Antrim hurler Neil McManus swimming in Cushendall. That friendship started in Kenya.

Ciarán Murtagh, the Roscommon footballer, is getting married on Saturday week; he said he’d travel and come home in midweek. The depth of goodwill has been extraordinary.

For the guts of 20 years Kerins has invited people to share his feelings. Who could refuse.