Saving lives comes naturally to Grundy brothers

Bravery obviously runs in the Grundy family from Skerries, Dublin.

Yesterday, Eric collected a National Bravery Award for saving a woman from drowning in December, making him the third member of the family to have made a life-saving intervention.

Eric’s older brother received a bravery award in Britain for saving the life of a man who jumped from the Severn Bridge, while the same week as Eric’s heroics last year, another of his brothers resuscitated an unconscious woman on Dublin’s Pearse St.

Eric, 31, was among a number of Ireland’s best and bravest acclaimed at the National Bravery Awards in Dublin’s Farmleigh House, where he received a silver medal and a certificate of bravery.

Currently unemployed but a long-time amateur photographer, he and his friend Gareth Nathan — who was also awarded a certificate of bravery — were out on a night-time photo shoot at Hanover Quay when Eric noticed a white object entering the sea at Grand Canal Basin. It was Dec 18 and the temperature was -4C.

“At first I thought it was a swan,” Eric said, “so we went over to have a look. Then we saw a woman wearing a white overcoat in the water. We were calling her and she was unresponsive, floating in the water. Her mobile phone had been left at the side of the deck and it rang and I answered it and it was her boyfriend.”

The couple seem to have had an argument and Gareth ran for help, with Eric continuing to call out to the woman.

“All that was sticking out of the water were her eyes, mouth, and nose — and then they disappeared.”

Eric, a former dive master who once spent a year working in the Caribbean, dived into the freezing waters after her, but the drama was far from over.

Grabbing the unconscious woman, Eric swam to a nearby wall, only to find there was no way of getting her up due to a 3 metre drop between the deck and the water. He swam with the woman to a nearby boat so he could hang onto it for support and began shouting for help. At this stage, the woman started to come to and Gareth returned and threw in a life ring. However, it had been vandalised, with just a foot of rope attached.

Eventually, Eric managed to haul the woman out “by the seat of her pants” to the fingertips of Gareth and others on the deck, using what he describes as the “superhuman strength” that only comes in a crisis.

He eventually got out himself, freezing cold and requiring hospital attention.

To top it all off, the woman never contacted him to thank him.

“I have never heard from her,” Eric said. “She is probably embarrassed. It doesn’t bother me.”

Eric and Gareth were joined yesterday by others who performed similar feats of heroism.

Gardaí Tom McKenna and Tommy Fay, with Sean Sharkey, plucked a teenage boy from a Cavan lake; off-duty paramedic Martin Whitmore hauled a woman from a car driven into the River Barrow; gardaí Trevor Keating and James Conneely, with Rory O’Connor, saved a man from the Garavogue River in Sligo; gardaí John Hennessy, Shaun Brosnan, and Mary Lonergan saved a man from a burning house in Tipperary; and Pearse Ward and Frank McManamon dealt with a dangerous attacker in city centre Dublin who was threatening a woman.

All 15 received awards yesterday from ceann comhairle Sean Barrett.