An Cosantóir

22 SEARCH AND RESCUE intensive care bed. However, as he also realised, it was the helicopter that made the real difference. A regular ambulance would have taken at least ninety minutes to get to Cork. 'When I learned that Glyn had the cardiac arrest, and that this might have happened in an ambulance on the side of a road en route to Cork if he hadn't already been flown there, I knew that we had been so lucky.' After three weeks in intensive care and high dependency at the Mater, Glyn was transferred back to Cork University Hospital. Several months later, in September, he returned on crutches to Blackwater Community School. Some seventeen months later, there was a slight bite to the wind as a small group of people gazed at a helicopter preparing to take off from Custume Army Barracks in Athlone. Alan had risen early for the three-hour drive from Cappoquin in County Waterford at the invitation of the Air Corps. With him were his daughter Celyn, now 16, and his two older sons Cilian, now 20, and Glyn, now 17 There to greet them were the full crew who had flown Glyn to hospital on the day of his accident. They were just about to view the aircraft in its hangar when it got the call to respond to an incident somewhere in the midlands. Glyn was having physiotherapy and had one more operation to go through but had been told that due to his age he would make a full recovery. Amid the friendly chat and banter about whether Glyn might join the Air Corps after his Leaving Certificate, there were some sobering exchanges about the details of the incident and how close a call it had been. The Air Corps pilots were unaware that what Alan had been told initially in hospital made him think his son wasn't going to make it. 'So you accept the injuries,' Alan recalled. 'If it was a wheelchair he had to come home in, that would have been fine. You accept anything when you are told your son is dead.' The Cappoquin tasking was one of thousands undertaken by the Air Corps EAS, but, as in search and rescue, air crews rarely come into contact with those they have assisted after the incident. 'If the alarm goes off, I am going to sprint off and will be in the air in five minutes,' Lieutenant Colonel Phil Bonner said, as he and Commandant Stephen Byrne explained, over a cup of tea in Custume Barracks, about how the service was established. It was a temporary measure at first, aimed at easing a political row over a decision by the then government in 2011 to close emergency services at Roscommon general hospital. A 2003 consultancy study, known as the Hanly report, had advised the closure as part of its recommendations on hospital reorganisation and the centralisation of full accident and emergency services. However, politicians expressed concern about the impact on patients across the west and midlands. The year after the Hanly report, a separate feasibility study on an all-Ireland emergency medical service had been commissioned: 'Dr Cathal O'Donnell, medical director of the National Ambulance Service, wanted to do a one-year trial of a helicopter emergency medical service to see if it would work from an economic and health benefit point of view,' Bonner explained. The closure of twenty-four- hour services at Roscommon provided the opportunity. Bonner was part of a team which established the service, working with senior Air Corps officers, including Lieutenant General Seán Clancy, who became Chief of Staff of the Defence Forces in 2021. 'I wrote a food-for-thought paper around 2011 about the capacity that we had to deliver and the need for it, and the situation with Roscommon arose around about the same time,' Clancy explained. 'As part of that, we looked at the gaps in the Monaghan, Cavan, north Mayo area, and the critical time frame Air Corps 112 Helicopter on scene at an RTC (Road Traffic Collision) - Photographer Kieran Minihane

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