The emergency services are increasingly coming under attack. Why does it happen and what can stop it, asks Rosita Boland
People working in the emergency services, whether fire brigade, ambulance or lifeboat, know that they may have to risk their lives trying to save others. But increasingly they face a disturbing new challenge when called out on a job - being attacked by the people who have called them there.
In the last five weeks, there have been six attacks on firemen in Dublin alone. The most recent was last Sunday, when a crew of six was attacked as it responded to a 999 call to a halting site on Dunsink Lane. The crew was stoned, and the windscreen and windows smashed by a large group of men. All six crew members are now on sick leave due to trauma.
Other incidents have included a fire officer requiring 35 stitches to his face after being hit by a bottle; an officer being head-butted; and another being hit on the head with a brick.
All emergency services have to deal with hoax calls, but the recent spate of attacks on personnel is a darker matter. One of the direct results of the increasing number of attacks has been an amendment this week to Section 19 of the Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act 1994. It will now be a specific public order offence to assault or threaten a member of the fire brigade or ambulance personnel.
So why do people behave in such a way? Are attacks on emergency personnel a way of venting anger against authority in general? Or is it drunken hooliganism descending ever further?
"It's really quite sinister that professionals are being attacked in the course of their work," says Patricia Casey, professor of psychiatry at UCD. "These jobs involve traumatic experiences anyway - fire and ambulance situations - and it opens up a whole new vista of traumas they would not have been subjected to before. It's an undermining of their professions."
While alcohol has often been taken by those carrying out the attacks, "increasingly people don't know right from wrong", says Casey. She also thinks that, lawlessness aside, there is a "copycat" element to the recent spate of attacks. "If gangs get to hear about one attack, then they're more likely to imitate what's happening. They love publicity."
For this reason, the emergency services are very reluctant to draw any attention to recent events, or to discuss morale. Requests by The Irish Times to interview fire brigade personnel who have been the victims of recent attacks were turned down.
It's a different story in Northern Ireland, where emergency services have had decades of hard experience dealing with attacks from the public while carrying out their duties.
"We've been running a television and radio campaign since 2004 about the consequences of attacking members of the fire brigade," explains Bill Majery, group commander in charge of community development at the Northern Ireland Fire Brigade headquarters. They have also run education programmes in schools.
"Crews have been stoned by children as young as 10, but it's predominantly young people in their early teens. The main thing we try and get across in the campaigns is to show young people the consequences of attacking fire crews. We've had to be very careful not to be seen to be encouraging attacks by publicising them - we don't show anyone being stoned, for instance," Majery says. "We go into schools and try and find out why children are doing it. It's mostly peer pressure. We've also found that if we send in crews who are from the area, the levels of attacks go down: it's much harder to stone someone who is known to you."
In 2003, there were 327 attacks on fire brigade personnel in Northern Ireland. Last year, there were 328, but the number of injuries requiring hospitalisation were half what they were in 2003. Majery attributes this directly to the success of their ad campaign, and to the education programme. "We're finally seeing the numbers of serious attacks going down," he says