Prestigious ‘frontline’ award for Westmeath native

“I see it as a privilege and an honour to get this as I’m kind of representing the frontline heroes all over the country,” said Gaybrook native Dawn Wallace, who has been announced as the Irish Independent Sport Star Frontline Star of the Year for 2020.

Dawn, an A&E nurse at the Midland Regional Hospital, Tullamore, was nominated for the award last summer by family friend Lynn Clarke, and stated that she accepted on behalf of all those who have worked in frontline services since the outbreak of Covid-19 in March of last year.

“If Covid’s devastating impact on society has drastically reset the national concept of heroism, Dawn Wallace seems almost emblematic of why that reset makes such sense,” writes Vincent Hogan of the Irish Independent.

“There isn’t a thread of self-pity discernible as she talks about how fear and loss and routine heartbreak have become the everyday grammar of those at war with the virus.

“Dawn even contracted Covid herself, but returned to work with colleagues she regards today, essentially, as a second family.”

A ladies’ football and camogie star with St Mary’s, Rochfortbridge and St Brigid’s respectively, Dawn lost her brother, Lee, to a rare form of bone sarcoma in December 2019 – just two months before the outbreak of Covid-19 in Ireland.

More of Dawn’s interview with the Irish Independent can be read here.