‘Saving lives is in my blood’

WHEN the pager sounds, you respond immediately.

All other concerns are secondary. That’s why Redmond and Blathnaid Walsh left a restaurant in Ballycotton on Redmond’s 50th birthday, leaving their teenage daughters with the bill.

It’s why a volunteer ran out of a burlesque night in full costume, and why Ronan Mac Giola Phádraig left school one day in his Leaving Cert year.

Others have left funerals, christenings, beds and Christmas dinners.

This is the commitment for Ireland’s 1,500 lifeboat crew members, who risk their lives to save others at sea.

Five hundred shore crew launch the boats and 2,000 fundraising volunteers raise €4m annually.

More than 1,000 calls were made for assistance in 2011, with 905 people rescued by lifeboat. A third of those rescues were in darkness.

“It’s in my blood,” Redmond Walsh, coxswain of the Ballycotton lifeboat, says.

“My father was coxswain, my grandfather was second coxswain. My brother, Michael, was the mechanic for 35 years. It was only natural that I would get involved.”

Many volunteers are from families with a tradition of RNLI involvement, but that’s changing. “The tradition of RNLI families is dying out,” Redmond says. “People are moving away and new people are moving in. And the range of people joining up has widened.”

Originally, the Ballycotton lifeboat crew was primarily fishermen. Now, the majority of recruits don’t have a nautical background. Diarmuid Walsh had never been to sea before he joined the RNLI.

“I was friends with Peter O’Shea, the chief mechanic, and he asked me if I wanted to come along for the spin.”

That was five years ago. He is second mechanic and left his job as a driver for Interlink to become coxswain on a rescue arc boat providing relief to the oil rigs in the North Sea.

Ireland has many female volunteers on RNLI lifeboat crews, although only one is trained as a coxswain. Maura Scanlon is one of two female mechanics. “I wanted to join when I was 18,” she says.

“But they weren’t taking women on the boat in those days. But when we moved back here, around nine years ago, Redmond asked me if I wanted to go out for a spin. I’ve been hooked ever since.”

Does she groan when the pager goes off? “There was one night, last November, where I went, ‘Jesus, I don’t believe this.’ But I just turned to my daughter and said, ‘say a prayer for me’. And I was gone.”

“A fishing boat was taking on water 20 miles of the coast,” Peter says.

“It was force 9-10 winds, and the Waterford helicopter, which had tasked as well, couldn’t make it to us due to the severity of the wind, rain, thunder and lightning. The waves were so big, and it was so dark outside, that you would feel the boat going up a wave and then freefall, because there was nothing behind it.”

Families are nervous on nights like this.

“My husband would wait for me by the pier the whole time I was gone,” Maura says. “Eventually, one of the lads said ‘You’re here all the time anyway, why don’t you become a part of the shore crew. And now he is’.”

When the pager goes, volunteers must get to the station immediately. They must live within ten minutes of the station.

The coxswain will have received a text with brief details from the Coast Guard, but the crew won’t be briefed until they are on the lifeboat. They go to the changing room — their gear includes a thermal undergarment and dry suit with rubber seals on the neck and wrists.

The toughest call-outs are for people the crew know. For example, the loss of trawler The Honeydew II in 2008. “We found two crewmen alive in a life raft after 18 hours at sea,” Peter says. “But then we found the other life raft, which hadn’t been launched, and we knew things weren’t looking good for the rest.” Ger Bohan, the Honeydew’s skipper, was well-known to them.

“It was eerie seeing bits of boat floating about in the water,” Diarmuid says.

“You weren’t sure if you were going to see a person hanging onto it or if they would be dead or alive.”

How do they keep going when prospects are grim?

“You just have to,” Redmond says. “You try and get some kind of result. A body, at least, can give closure to the family.”

Lough Ree is the newest of the country’s 44 lifeboat stations. Its launch on Jul 1 marked the end of a 20-year campaign to get a lifeboat on the second biggest lake on the River Shannon.

“We don’t usually put lifeboats on inland waterways unless we are specifically asked,” Martyn Smith, the divisional inspector for the RNLI, says. “But we put together an inquiry and decided that one was required for the area.” There is huge activity on the lake — up to 3,000 private boats.

Previously in the area, search and recovery was provided voluntarily by the Athlone Sub Aqua Club.

“We weren’t trained for rescue and it would have taken us about 20 minutes to get out on the lake,” Robbie West says. They weren’t insured, leaving them open to action by unscrupulous victims. The club, with members of the yacht club, Inland Waterways and the Order of Malta, make up the new 18-person crew and they have been rigorously trained.

“There was nobody here before us to show us the ropes,” says West, “so, we’ve had to start from scratch, logging three hours a week each on the boat and taking annual leave to go on intensive, week-long sessions in the RNLI headquarters in Poole, England.”

Those who were selected as helm went back for a further week.

Like the volunteers, the station is on a one-year probation; they must prove there is a demand for the boat and that it is being met. Since their first call-out, in July, they have been called nine times.

While the Aran Island’s lifeboat conducts medical evacuations for the islanders, both life-threatening and routine, primarily it provides search, rescue and recovery services for the seafarers and fishermen off the western seaboard.

They’re called out, on average, four times a month, sometimes in the space of two days. “It’s exhausting,” Ronan Mac Giola Phadraig says.

“You’ve been on your feet from 8am, when you get the shout at 8pm. Then, you’re out at sea for eight more hours. If it’s a long search, we try to rotate. The shore crew will call around and wake lads up.”

But they struggle to maintain crews in winter.

“You’ll see the same guys coming down, over and over, for a period of about six weeks, when the younger crowd go back to college. With the downturn in the fishing trade, we’ve lost a lot of men to emigration and, of the rest of the men who stay on the island, it’s hard to pull them in if they haven’t joined already.”

Why do they make the sacrifice? “I love the excitement of it,” West says. Mac Giola Phadraig says it develops a sense of social responsibility.

Peter O’Shea says: “When I was leaving my last job, to become the mechanic of the lifeboat, my boss was pretending to be annoyed. But then he said ‘It will never be on your headstone that you worked here, but it could well be on your headstone that you do this. So fair play to you’.”