Safety fears as council struggles to find lifeguards

DUBLIN City Council (DCC) doesn’t have enough lifeguards to “safely do what we should be doing a lot of the time”, a senior city manager has said.

Assistant chief Richard Shakespeare said that the council cannot add extra lifeguards on its main beach just because there is a heatwave.

Mr Shakespeare said the council has struggled to recruit lifeguards in recent years.

He said that DCC doesn’t have “lifeguards on tap” during the extraordinary hot weather the country has been experiencing over the past two months.

DCC has responsibility for the beaches in Dublin city centre – Dún LaoghaireRathdown looks after south Dublin and Fingal looks after north Dublin.

It’s understood lifeguards are only employed to work at Dollymount Beach between 11.30am and 7.30pm, but DCC says the lifeguards can stay on longer if required.

“There has been... a difficulty in getting the volume of lifeguards that you require for this type of thing,” Mr Shakespeare said.

“We go out, we recruit and we can’t get enough of them.

“It’s not as easy as saying we have lifeguards on tap that we can put on an extra shift if the weather is good and take them off if not.

“A lot of the time we don’t actually have the number of lifeguards to safely do what we should be doing.”

Four teenage boys were rescued off the coast of Bundoran, Co Donegal, yesterday after getting into difficulty swimming.

The youths were carried out 100m from shore by a swell.

A local rescue boat was dispatched, along with a helicopter from Sligo, after a bather raised the alarm.

All four boys were rescued by boat and were uninjured by their ordeal.