Lifesaver road safety message hits home

A SMALL team of Limerick gardaí and paramedics are striking fear into young motorists with good effect.

A “shock and awe” approach to the reality of death on the road is hitting home with a new road safety road presentation called Lifesaver.

It mixes entertainment with raw reality.

The new approach to road safety has been drawn up by garda Tony Miniter.

When Lifesaver was launched in front of 280 students at Limerick Institute of Technology, the gardaí were greeted with polite derision.

Within 30 minutes an enthralled silence gripped the audience.

Garda Miniter told The Garda Review: “We realised in putting Lifesaver together that if you present young adults with something aimed at adults, and delivered in a realistic manner, from someone who was on the frontline getting their hands dirty and bloody at the side of the road, then it is an experience for them.”

The presentation is a powerful mix of death, tragedy, heartbreaking stor-ies packed with powerful video images and strong music.

Garda Miniter said: “I relate some of my own experiences. One was the accident scene I attended where a boy aged 12 was killed. A mother was trying to retrieve her child’s runner from the middle of the road. next to a pool of congealed blood. It was the story behind another statistic.

“It transpired they were a very poor family and the child had just got a new pair of runners that day and had been over the road to show them to his friends.

“His body had been taken away and all that was left at the scene was the shoe.”

Paramedic Keith Mullan also puts his experience into a high-impact delivery.

He recalls taking bodies from cars while the corpses are still warm.

He recalled one scene: “Their mobile phone started to ring in his pocket and I took it out and looked down and saw the word ‘mum’ flashing on the screen. It was four in the morning.

“What do you do? You know some mother somewhere is ringing her child who is dead.”

Mr Mullan also gives a poignant perspective of the pain and suffering they find at accident scenes.

He said: “A paramedic is like a new mum: The paramedic likes to hear screaming and crying when they get there as it means people are alive and they can do something for them. Where there is screaming there is life. The worst sound is the eerie silence after a bad crash.”

He said there is closure when they take a young body to the morgue.

“But placing a young person in a fridge is something that is very unnatural, surreal. That is the message.

“Road accidents are not particular about who they take. We want to give a different insight rather than statistics.”

The Lifesaver team have their own specially equipped cruiser vehicle and Limerick City Council commissioned a logo for the campaign.

One recent presentation was to so-called boy racers and young drivers in Limerick who use their cars for cruising.

Garda Miniter said: “There were 60 of them. If we had asked them to turn up they probably wouldn’t have, so I suggested a pilot scheme on a local basis whereby if a young driver is stopped by us for a minor offence such as registration plate misdemeanour, then instead of a court summons we offer a caution in exchange for attending the presentation.”

However, insufficient funding is preventing the Lifesaver campaign being expanded to attend motor shows and conventions.

Garda Miniter: “We have a brand-new, beautiful land cruiser, and many young male drivers will come and talk to us about it. It gives us a chance to engage with them.

“Young lads hate to be patronised. I will often go to where the cruisers congregate and initially they will jeer or laugh at me. But after a while they appreciate I am talking to them.”