Tánaiste: Equal priority for rural/urban life

“IN truth from where we are here we now have an ambulance with advanced paramedics that can be on the scene in less than 20 minutes to the south of here to somewhere as isolated as Crookhaven, to the west of here to somewhere on the Dingle peninsula, to the east of here in Dungarvan.between seven and 14 minutes.”

So spoke Tánaiste Simon Coveney as he launched the Air Ambulance Service at Rathcool Aerodrome on Monday. a service which he described as ‘critically important’ to communities in rural Munster.

The attendance at the opening of three ministersas well as five members of the Oireachtas from four different constituencies underlined the importance of the service to so many communities, said Minister Coveney.

The Tánaiste paid tribute to ICRR’s co-founder John Kearney and his ‘extraordinary net work of volunteers with a lot of determination who had simply insisted on finding a way to make this model work as they knew it would add significantly to health provision to so many people living in isolated locations’.

“We live in a country that values rural communities and we need state infrastructure that allows people to live in rural parishes and places that they grew up and not be effectively discriminated against because of the lack of quality of life or security or healthcare or access to technology or information and so on.

“We need to constantly challenge ourselves as a government and a State to ensure quality of life issues in rural parishes are an equal priority to that of people living in city centres.”

Tánaiste Coveney said the establishment of the air ambulance service on Monday was a really good example of that. “It’s an example where the initiative has come from the ground up.”

Hitherto people would have had questions if their loved ones had died on the way to hospital. According to the Minister, their questions will now be answered with the new service.

“Even in those terrible circumstances this helicopter service will address an awful lot of the ‘what ifs’ that where people may have been asking the question ‘if only we had’.”