National Water Safety Awareness Week (“Water Safety Week”) will run from today Monday June 20th to Sunday June 26th.
1. A €10K radio and online campaign is promoting www.safetyzone.ie and there is also a radio/online campaign promoting the wearing of lifejackets (attached IWS20SecVersion1 is Colm Plunkett speaking about how a lifejacket saved his life).
2. An additional radio/online campaign will encourage people to learn swimming and lifesaving skills as eleven people drown every month (attached).
3. A further radio campaign will feature the parents of Caolan Seoige who drowned last year aged fifteen.
4. A radio advert will also run featuring RTE’s Miriam O’Callaghan (available on our YouTube channel but please do not share with your local radio stations due to copyright issues - https://youtu.be/Nlp_RcAs_iI.
5. A number of 30-second infomercials will also run online, filmed last week to give some key messages (Know Your Lifeguard Flags / How to use a ringbuoy / Inland waterways safety / coastal safety / safetyzone). The first of five about inland waterways is here https://www.facebook.com/IWSie/videos/1113288725401047/. Please share.
6. Press releases will focus on a number of themes including safetyzone, the fact that 37 children aged 14 and under drowned in ten years, that 1,379 people drowned in a decade (137 every year) and that schools still have time to run Irish Water Safety’s official primary school curriculum http://paws.iws.ie/. First one attached with an online copy here: http://www.iws.ie/media/press-releases.607.html.
7. You’ll notice some references to www.watersafety.ie – although we will of course continue to always use www.iws.ie, I have had some feedback over the years that iws.iedoes not clearly associate with water for some people that have never heard of us so I’ve simply registered www.watersafety.ie and pointed it to our main site.