The latest location to be added to the 'Gaelic Voices For Change' campaign, that will see over 450 current and former GAA and LGFA players sleep-out on Saturday night to raise awareness and funding for a number of homeless charities, is Quebec on the east coast of Canada where temperatures are expected to plunge to -20 degrees this weekend,

The latest location to be added to the 'Gaelic Voices For Change' campaign, that will see over 450 current and former GAA and LGFA players sleep-out on Saturday night to raise awareness and funding for a number of homeless charities, is Quebec on the east coast of Canada where temperatures are expected to plunge to -20 degrees this weekend,

It is the undertaking of one individual with a background in Limerick GAA who has made a significant donation but wishes to remain anonymous.

"He doesn't want anyone to do it with him because it's so cold. But he wants to do it himself. I don't know how he's doing it," confessed former Dublin footballer Eamonn Fennell, one of the prime movers in a campaign that has steadily gathered pace over the last few weeks.

If Quebec is the smallest and most isolated of the locations, Dublin's GPO will be the biggest where over 150 have already committed to 'bedding down' between 6pm on Saturday evening and 6am on Sunday morning.

But Belfast's Cornmarket, Wexford's Bull Ring, Cork's Courthouse, Carlow, Portlaoise, Naas, Limerick, Galway and Sligo will also be staging sleep-outs, while New York and Boston complete the international arm of a campaign that had, by yesterday afternoon, had received pledges and donations up to €102,000.

Among those sleeping out in Dublin will be the capital's hurling manager Pat Gilroy, current footballers Diarmuid Connolly, Paddy Andrews, Mick Fitzsimons and former players Charlie Redmond, Vinny Murphy and Johnny Magee in addition to members of the Dublin ladies team which won this year's All-Ireland title, among them Sinéad Finnegan.

Belfast will include Derry and Slaughneil's Chrissy McKaigue and former Down footballer Ross Carr among others while Diarmuid and Ciarán Lyng, Matthew O'Hanlon and Lee Chin will be in Wexford.

Cork's Munster hurling title-winning captain Stephen McDonnell will join Anna Geary and Valerie Mulcahy, while Limerick will attract players from Clare, Limerick and Tipperary with Brendan Maher, Patrick 'Bonner' Maher, Gavin O'Mahony and Podge Collins among them. Carlow football manager Turlough O'Brien will sleep out in Carlow while Eamonn O'Hara is the main driver of the Sligo location.

Fennell said it was the charity work and activism of GAA players like Alan Kerins, Joe Canning, Kevin McManamon and Philly McMahon, at home and abroad, that prompted others, through the Gaelic Players Association (GPA), to see what they could do.

"There are a few of us wanted to do more but felt a collective approach would have been best because our time is so limited with playing football, work and families whatever it is," said Fennell.

"The GPA organised for Ruairi McKiernan (one of the founders of SpunOut.ie and Uplift) to come down and put structure and guidance and find out what it is we wanted to do and how we go about doing it. He was instrumental through the whole process.

"We went fact-finding for over two months, meeting the homeless, visiting hostels, Simon, Peter McVerry, families living in hotels, we found as much information from that as we needed to.

"So the next thing for us is to actually sleep rough and walk in these people's shoes and experience it and, more importantly, feel it, feel the cold weather, feel what it is they're going through, try to replicate it as much as they can where people get a full understanding of what homeless people go through."

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Irish Independent