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A GAA referee who suffered vile Twitter abuse has told how he got his life back on track following a suicide attempt.

Patrick Nelis was targeted by online trolls after he refereed the Meath senior football championship final in 2013.

The game was broadcast on TG4 and Mr Nelis had been on anti-depressant medication in the months beforehand and had put on weight.

After the game he sat in floods of tears at home reading the torrent of abuse from online trolls on social media.

It was then that he decided to take an overdose.

He said: "I took the overdose but what I didn’t realise was that I had sent a text, halfway through it all, saying I was going to do something.

“I don’t remember sending it.

“My friend, who had a key, came around, found me on the bathroom floor. I was out basically cold. I was taken to Navan Hospital.”

Brave Mr Nelis said he has since returned to work.

He told Sean O'Rourke on RTE Radio: "I missed the first few weeks of the new season but I'm back refereeing now.

"I've started refereeing senior football again and did a local derby recently.

"I've lost three stone in weight since I've come back. I've worked hard."

He said people involved in football, players and officials, should be allowed to have social media accounts without receiving the kind of abuse directed at them.

He said: "Everybody is entitled to an opinion, as long as they know where the line is with that opinion.

"Articles will criticise you if you've had a bad game. [If you had] you will say you had a bad game, fair enough.

"At the end of the day, referees are entitled to have their own social media.

"Nobody deserves the abuse I've got, or the abuse some of the GAA players got last year.

"When people are fragile, it absolutely tipped me over the edge. I was bottling everything up.

"I've refereed him [one of the trolls] since. It's a new game, you don't carry over something that happened.

"My advice to him or other people would be; you don't know what other people are going through.

"The GAA have started cracking down now. But there's a lot of abuse directed at refereers. The bans are not big enough. They should send out a clear message.

"It's [verbal abuse] part and parcel of the game but a line must be drawn somewhere."

Mr Nelis previously described the sickening abuse he suffered.

He said: “I took a lot of abuse on Twitter after the county final that affected me badly. I took serious abuse, people Tweeting stuff like, ‘the fat, red hamster’.

“I remember sitting at home reading that stuff in floods of tears. I kept reading it again and again, trying to get behind the reason people would say such things.

“I shouldn’t have done that, I shouldn’t have read it.”

Originally from the Urney club in Tyrone , Nelis moved to Meath in 2006 and joined Kells club Kilmainham.

He praised the GAA community generally for supporting him during a difficult period and hopes his tale of recovery can help others.

Nelis told the Meath Chronicle: “I’ll tell you, only for the GAA, it kept me going. There were a few county board members who knew I was depressed, a couple of them on the management committee were very good to me.

“One rang me up a few times every day, he was worried about me. One of them rang me continuously one day, couldn’t get me, he was worried.”

If you have been affected by the issues discussed in this story you can contact The Samaritans here.