FIREFIGHTERPADDY DAYSGONEFISHIN’
AS he finished his last shift on 23 June, Paddy Agnew brought to an end a near 35-year career as a fireman.
It was at 8am to be exact, at the close of another 12-hour stint, that he bade farewell to a job that by its very nature saw him and his colleagues called out to some harrowing and heart-breaking scenes.
Nevertheless, Paddy admits he will miss the important role he carried out for the fire service, since joining in December, 1985.
‘I will miss it and the people I worked with, some fabulous guys who were all good and good to me.
‘It’s your other family,’ he said of his colleagues in a profession where they worked 12-hour shifts from 8pm to 8am, ‘ two days, two nights, then four off ’.
Save for a four-month spell on promotion in Drogheda, Paddy has been based at the Meadow Grove station in Dundalk.
He has spent the past 10 or eleven years as Station Officer in charge of Blue Watch, overseeing all operations and a crew of five or six, as well as retained firefighters when they are required.
While technology has changed to the extent that everything is now computerised, Paddy reveals that the equipment has not really altered that much.
‘A lot of the same equipment is still there. Of course, some of it was new at the time, such as the ‘ jaws of life’ for road traffic accidents.
‘My brief was equipment and it was hard to get funding for it.’
Reflecting on his time as a fireman, Paddy said a number of major incidents stuck out, such as the church fire in Louth Village on the same day in April, 2003 that another inferno raged simultaneously in Earl Street, Dundalk, destroying the iconic RQ O’Neill and McKenna Man buildings.
The fire at Horseware in Quay Street in 2000 was another major blaze, he said; while five years later a number of his colleagues were injured following an explosion at Crumb Rubber in Dromiskin as they initially tackled a smaller fire.
Fortunately, there was no loss of life in those incidents, though tragically that was not the case in many accidents on the road.
Paddy remembered people killed on the Newry Road, particularly before the motorway opened, and at Ballymascanlon Bridge.
Sadly, his final call-out was to a fatality on the M1. A man died following a collision involving a car and a lorry between Junction 17 and Junction 16.
‘You have to take the good with the bad,’ he said.
There was no little good when Paddy saved a man’s life after a road accident in the 1990s.
‘I was with him in the back of the ambulance on the way to hospital. He basically died, but I got him back using the Brook Airway and CPR.’
At the hospital the surgeon remarked that whoever did the CPR saved the man’s life as he had serious head injuries.
It earned Paddy a commendation from then Chief Fire Officer for Louth Eamon McGuire.
He is also actively involved in Dundalk Sub Aqua Club, and now that Paddy has more time on his hands he plans to travel.
‘I will be doing a lot of scuba diving and boating. You could say I’ll be ‘ Gone Fishin’,’ added Paddy who lives in Belfry Gardens.
He is married to Marie and they have three children, Pádraic, an Army officer, Christine and Kerry.