Ex-midwife honoured for role with Omagh Volunteer Centre

When what looked like a losing battle with cancer forced Monica Coyle to step away from her career as a midwife in 1995, the Greencastle woman was not sure how the future would pan out.

Up until that point, Monica’s life had been dominated and fulfilled by family and work; now all of that was threatened.

However, despite the terminal decline that she watched many of her fellow cancer patients take, her own worst fears never came to pass.

After a few hard years of illness, treatment and other health difficulties, she recovered from the sickness that forced her into retirement – only to find an abundance of free time waiting for her on the other side.

“I had all these hours and I hadn’t a clue what do with them,” said Monica, whose fresh face and bright disposition belies the fact that her 80th birthday milestone lies right around the corner.

“The question was obvious but important: How should I spend all my new time?”

Monica was to find her answer in the act of volunteering.

In fact, when we spoke with the 78-year-old last week, she had just been presented with a bunch of flowers to mark 25 years of virtually uninterrupted service to Omagh Volunteer Centre (OVC), an organisation which she helped establish at the turn of the millennium.

Sacrificed

Surrounded by people who ardently admire her, Monica was called on stage at the Silverbirch Hotel, Omagh. After she had accepted her award and descended the steps of the makeshift stage, we got a chat with Monica to find out why she has sacrificed so much of her life to helping others.

“The start of it was when I joined Greencastle Community Association, which then led to to the Omagh Forum,” she explained. “It then put me on the path towards what became Omagh Volunteer Centre.

“It wasn’t that I thought surviving the cancer was a second chance at life or anything like that; it was just always in my nature to be kind. And I found that the volunteering suited me well.”

At the start, Monica said she and her colleagues were ‘naive, but willing’.

“We hardly had a clue what we were at, but we knew we wanted to help people. I remember we were given a few thousand pounds to try to get things going and there was hardly a bank in the town that would take us on, you know.

“Eventually we got somewhere and we tried to steady the ship from there, but, until recently, there have been plenty of ups and downs. At one time we had a bad leak that nearly put us under, but we managed to get it sorted,” laughed Monica.

The 78-year-old, who almost lost her life to heart condition, ‘broken heart syndrome’, at Christmas, recalled how she and her friends started out with Omagh Volunteer Centre.

“The first thing we did when we got going was ring around local people, sort of on behalf of the local GPs. They would tell us who to keep an eye on, and we would call and see if they were okay, check if they needed anything.

“As well as that, I used to go and visit people who were not well, just to give their families a chance to go to the shop or head out for a walk.

“It was almost always grand, but sometimes you would almost laugh when you got out the door.”

To this day, Monica still goes and visits some ‘older people’.

“There are quite a few that I will still call out to, you know, just for a chat and a bit of company.

“I have seen how much good a chat can do in my time doing this.”

However, while she still finds volunteering an enriching force in her life, she is glad that she is no longer as responsible for the operational management of Omagh Volunteer Centre.

“The girls in charge now are just brilliant and they know exactly what they are at. You never have to worry, which frees me up to basically just do whatever I can be bothered with,” Monica laughed again.

“Seriously, though, doing something for nothing is so good for you. Volunteering can teach you things about yourself you never knew, reveal your true potential, build your confidence, increase your capacity, and, for some people, help them find employment.

“It’s one of the best things I have ever done and I am so proud to have done my bit to get Omagh Volunteer Centre to where it is today.”