Heroic volunteers who will spend Christmas and New Year out responding to emergencies at sea have warned the public: “The ocean doesn’t forgive.”
The Irish Mirror spent several hours with dedicated rescuers from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution who have saved countless lives from drowning and helped thousands of boats to shore.
The RNLI – mainly funded through donations and legacies – has 46 lifeboat stations in Ireland.
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Around 95% of the crucial service’s workforce are unpaid volunteers who give up hundreds of hours each year to train and carry out precarious sea rescues. Most balance their RNLI duties with full-time jobs.
We went out with the volunteers stationed at Dublin’s busy Dun Laoghaire station.
Once an emergency call is logged, the Coast Guard will inform the RNLI, and depending on what the situation is, they will either launch their All-Weather Life Boat or the Inshore Lifeboat. In certain circumstances both will be used.
This year alone, Dun Laoghaire has launched its rescue boats on 91 callouts and logged 268 hours at sea, and helped more than 100 people.
The station’s captain Mark McGibney, known as a coxswain, has been involved with the charity for 33 years. He manages the team of 30 volunteers.
The experienced seaman has been involved in hundreds of call-outs during his service but said one, in particular, shaped him for ever and changed the way he parents his two children.
Mark told the Irish Mirror: “We got a call that a person had come off the cliff and landed on the beach, but the area wasn’t accessible by land. The sea had then washed the body into a cove.
“So that was the call but the thing that stuck in my head was how it was a young boy who died, which was horrific.
“The other person who was with me on the day quit the RNLI that week because they couldn’t handle it.
“After the fact, we found out that boy had written a letter to his parents and it was in the schoolbag at the top of the hill. It said: ‘I’m really sorry.’ He was afraid to go home to give his parents his school results because he failed a test.
“So that was actually a life lesson to me I’ve actually used in how I’ve parented my children in their exams and their education. I’ve never forgotten that, it was one of my most difficult days in the RNLI.”
Volunteers carry pagers on their hips and are on call 24/7 – dropping everything as soon as they go off. Mark revealed his bleep once went off just before midnight on New Year’s Eve and he along with fellow crew members rang in the New Year while towing a broken-down boat back to shore.
The highly-skilled volunteer also revealed that the number of call-outs since the pandemic has doubled.
He explained: “People were looking for something to do to keep fit during Covid but they wanted to do it by themselves. So activities like walking the beaches, canoeing, wind-surfacing, swimming, all these single-person sports have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people doing them.
“Therefore the amount of calls in that area has also raised because sea swimming is not something that can be taken lightly and sometimes people get it wrong and think, ‘Oh I can do that’.”
Mark, who works in a yacht club in Dun Laoghaire, warned that the sea “doesn’t forgive” and urged people to “treat it carefully” because it can do “strange things, especially in rough conditions”.
He said: “You can get wind and tide in certain directions fighting each other and it’s like a washing machine.”
Meanwhile, fellow crew member Kieran ‘Colley’ O’Connell, who is Dun Laoghaire’s mechanic and deputy coxswain, said he recalls sitting down to have Christmas dinner one year when his pager went off.
A number of crew members raced to the station and launched the lifeboat. Colley said: “It was supposed to be for a French yacht that was in trouble… it turns out it was a hoax, so that was a bit upsetting but it’s a job that we do and if someone is in trouble we will respond.”
Colley explained that the RNLI, which receives no Government funding, would rather launch their lifeboat if a member of the public is concerned about something they’ve seen even if it turns out to be a false alarm.
Those in the station call these “a false alarm with good intent” but stress that these are different than malicious hoax calls. He told us: “It’s a lot easier for us to come back than to go out when it’s too late.” Speaking about how quickly things can change, Colley, who has 39 years of service with the RNLI, told us: “The pager can go off at any time. One minute, I’m in here doing reports and, the next minute you’re 20 miles out.”
Garda Paul Cummins, who has been in the RNLI for 13 years, recalled a recent rescue when a paddleboarder got into difficulty near Bray, Co Wicklow. He said: “The Coast Guard helicopter was searching as well, it took us about 20 minutes to get down and there was no sight of him. I went up on the flybridge and looked over to my left side and you could just see his paddleboard. I shouted down and as we got closer, I could just see his face bobbing in and out of the water.
“They were his dying seconds, he was off the board and he was actively drowning. A person at Bray is one of our worst-case scenarios because it’s at the end of our patch.
“Once we’re moving, it takes us about 20 minutes to get there. That paddleboarder was in a very bad way, but thankfully he survived.”
One of Dun Laoghaire’s newest recruits – Ailbhe Smith, who joined last year – said the crew members are like a “second family” to her.
The 31-year-old, who works in finance, said: “ It’s so nice. Everybody is there for each other and the level of training you get is incredible.”
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