Like the Klaxon of an ambulance, the urgent sound of a fire siren is impossible to ignore. Wherever it's heard, people pull in, perhaps meditating fleetingly on its destination - and on their own mortality - as it pulses past.
As in sea rescues, fire-fighting is primarily dependent on trained manpower. Equipment in both cases is an invaluable aid, but without people to use it correctly and calmly, even the best equipment is useless in life-threatening situations. Fire-fighting is only part of the fire brigade's job: the other most frequent call-out is for road traffic accidents. They also help out in times of flooding, oil spillages, collapsed bridges and cliff rescues.
All Irish cities, and several large towns, have a permanent fire crew, whose sole and only job is working for the fire service. In rural areas, cover is supplied by crews who work rotas on retainers, and who have full-time jobs outside the fire-service. In the Republic, there are 1,222 people working full-time for the fire authority, and 1,968 working on retainers, according to the latest figures available, which are for December 1998. To put the figures into some perspective, the Cork County service (excluding Cork city), which covers the biggest county in the State, has just nine people full-time and 261 on retainer. Mayo has seven full time people and 131 on retainer.
The Belmullet fire station, out in the crook of the Erris peninsula's mighty arm, clenched tight over the Atlantic, is a long way from the nearest big towns of Castlebar and Ballina. The Belmullet station covers a region of approximately 500 square miles, and is currently manned by nine part time firemen. There is a vacancy for a 10th job. Last year, the station had some 100 call-outs. Fires, particularly chimney fires, composed about 75 per cent of those. Most of the rest were for road accidents.
It's a freezing cold morning, with a nasty east wind. The Belmullet firemen, overseen by station officer Gus Ruddy, are in the yard of their small but beautifully cared-for station, doing some of their mandatory annual 100 hours practice. The firemen are: sub-officer Joe Murphy, Patrick Barrett, Michael Barrett, Mick Lally, Michael Gruddy, John McNulty, Gary Bohan and Donal Shevlin.
Firemen on retainers work to a rota system. Five are on call every week. Network coverage in this part of Mayo is patchy, so mobile phones are only used as a back-up; pagers are the standard issue. All firemen must live within a mile and a half of the station, so they can get there quickly when called. Every couple of years, two of them go away for an update on training and new equipment and, on their return, teach the others what they learned. The council supplies the equipment.
Being on call as a fireman means precisely that: the pager is on all the time, and you have to be ready to drop everything and head for the station. This means that you're not likely to be spending any time in the pub, for instance, during that time.
"You're only as good as your last call," Joe Murphy says, several times. His own father was also a fireman. Murphy explains that people will swap their rotas if their week coincides with a big social gathering. Crew-members must procure a letter of freedom from their full-time employers, which releases them from work (on full pay) when their pager goes.
"People are good about it, generally," Ruddy says. The crew agree that it is a two-way process: one never knows when it may be the employer who needs to call the fire brigade, for whom his employee also works. Between them, the current crew of nine have some 135 years of fire-fighting experience. Ruddy alone has 34 years.
They are clear that, while experience is invaluable, every fire is different and an unknown quantity. "You have to be frightened of a fire," offers Patrick Barrett. "You have to be aware of what it can do." Apart from the experience of doing the job, the local crew also have the advantage of knowing the roads in what is a remote and often unsignposted area.
The annual fee for acting as retainer depends on length of service, but it begins at £4,500 for between one and 10 years. It's undoubtedly money hard-earned, given the level of commitment and responsibility involved. However, it's also worth observing that, in less affluent days, such an additional steady income in rural Ireland would have been - and still is, judging from the comments of the Belmullet crew - welcome.
Out in the yard, after testing pumps, nozzles, and water pressure, the crew is drilled about responding to a car accident. In a corner of the yard, there is a car which has been procured from the scrapyard for practice purposes. Simulating an accident scene, Gary Bohan gets into the driving seat to act as the trapped victim.
"Most of the time, if you get a call out to a chimney fire, you're fairly sure by the description you get that you can bring it under control. Those times, going out in the engine, the craic would be good with the lads. But when you get a call-out to a road accident, there's not a word spoken on the way out, apart from briefing everyone on what their job is once we arrive. You never know what's going to be waiting for you at a car accident," says Joe Murphy, to the agreement of the others.
At the scene of an accident, everyone has a pre-assigned job, which the officer in charge can reassess on arrival. Bohan is supposedly trapped in the driver's seat, between the steering wheel and seat. The extent of his injuries is not clear, but since emphasis is always on protecting the spinal cord, before anything can be done, the car must first be stabilised.
Everyone is assigned their job by numbers, rather than names. What follows is like watching a speeded-up film, as everyone goes to fetch the equipment that has been assigned to them. In fewer minutes than I can keep track of, protective plastic has been placed over the victim, the windscreen cut out and removed, the steering wheel forced up under a compressed airbag with ropes attached to the bonnet, and the roof cut open to resemble a sardine can with what look like huge tin-openers. A board is placed under the prone victim, who has been attended all this time by a fireman whose sole duty it is to talk to him, and offer whatever reassurance is possible, and the victim is then handed over to the imaginary ambulance crew.
Like Lazarus, at that point, Gary Bohan takes up his bed and walks. The others tidy away the equipment. Looking at the wrecked vehicle, its roof a huge, unnatural-looking flap, it's all too horribly and shockingly evident how fragile a car is. As our dreadful road death statistics can testify.
Even though this is a practice, the sense of urgency, focus and utter professionalism created by the crew is astonishing. It's possible to sense something of the atmosphere and the adrenalin that must be abundant at an accident scene, when a few precious minutes can mean the difference between life and death.
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