Tribesmen Rowing Club

Based in the heart of Galway city and founded in 1976 there are over 100 members in Tribesmen Rowing Club at present, including some of the founder members still rowing regularly. We have one part-time professional coach, several volunteer coaches and plenty of members who volunteer to steer boats for others, hold social events, schedule the myriad of crews, fund raise or even just go down and help with the heavy lifting when a hand is needed. The committee are all volunteers and put a lot of time into running the club, all of the above activities, and running the annual Galway Head of the River race on St Patrick’s weekend with NUIG, when hundreds of boats race on the Corrib all day long. Rowing is usually considered an elite sport and very few Irish rowing clubs provide any facilities for recreational rowing or to train adults to row unless they are young and fit enough to have a competitive career for the club. In Tribesmen we have taken a very different approach and our adult rowing programme is going from strength to strength with rowing sessions on the Corrib weekdays, evenings and weekends, rowing tours to France and German rowing tourists visiting us in 2014 and a waiting list for our May 2015 learn-to-row camps. In addition to beginners as old as 70, we have an elite sculler, Siobhan McCrohan, who won silver in Piediluco, Italy, last month and our adaptive sculler Katie O’Brien won gold in para rowing at Women’s Henley last summer. The club is proud of its cancer recovery rowing programme, the only one in the west of Ireland, which enjoys the support and volunteer input of club members, and remains the only rowing rehabilitation programme in the west of Ireland for breast cancer recovery.