‘We are like one big family, especially if someone is struggling’

For the last 47 years, Navan man Michael Fitzsimons has been to the forefront of helping people through tragedies, emergencies and extreme weather events, first as a Civil Defence volunteer and for the past 27 years as Meath County Council's Civil Defence Officer.

Michael hangs up his hat on the job this week, but says he hopes to still be involved in civil defence in some way.

“I intend to keep a connection with the organisation,” he says.

From Michael's first involvement as a volunteer, until his retirement he has been involved in helping people, from co-ordinating and participating in searches for missing people, providing assistance during extreme weather events, to providing medical cover at big events.

For the past 19 months though, he has been played a major role in helping the people of Meath through the Covid-19 pandemic and the various lockdowns.

“We have had 800 taskings over the Covid period – which is four times what we normally would have in the same period,” he explains,

“It was mainly transporting people to clinics and hospital appointments, delivering medical equipment and we were involved with the Meath Partnership food hub.”

He explains that training had to be cancelled over the last 19 months, but will now be resuming again.

“We had 95 per cent of our volunteers carrying out tasks during Covid – we have members who have underlying conditions and of course some of our members are frontline workers.”

Michael, who is a Navan man, started his career working for Rehab in Navan, which was based at the time in the old “fever hospital” which is where the ambulance bay is now.

“Civil Defence used to do their training beside us and one day I was talking to one of the lads and asked him what it was all about.

“He told me they were having training that Sunday and invited me to go along.

“I went to it and ended up on a stretcher! They were suspending it out a window and lowering it down, as part of the training.

“I enjoyed it, the craic was good and I've been with them ever since.”

That was September 1974 and Michael continued to volunteer for Civil Defence over the next 20 years.

“I was 22 years with Rehab and then in 1994, the opportunity came up to take on the role of the Civil Defence Officer for Co Meath.”

Michael explains that Civil Defence grew out of what had been a wartime organisation to having a peacetime role.

Meath County Council had Civil Defence officers over the years who also had other roles in the council, but in the 1970s it became a full time role.

His job over the past 27 years was running the organisation, recruiting volunteers and developing training programmes, as well as organising events and competitions to assess the skills of the volunteers.

Among the training courses are first aid, search and rescue, emergency catering and accommodation, radio communication, firefighting and pumping, and rope rescue..

Volunteers are also skilled in water searches with boats and kayaks.

“There are a lot of opportunities for training for volunteers. We offer all of them here in Meath.”

Today there are over 200 Civil Defence volunteers in the county and eight training centres.

“We have the routine things like weekly training and providing medical or ambulance cover at events.”

“We work closely with the frontline services,” Michael says.

Civil Defence has over the years been involved in helping out in searches for missing people and many of then had tragic outcomes.

“The fatalities are the hard bit. We have a good support network for our volunteers – we are like one big family, especially if someone is struggling.”

“We have had some low times over the years – we have lost four volunteers in service.”

Meath Civil Defence competes in and is very successful in competitions and as far back as 1980, Michael was team leader when the Meath team won the All Ireland Rescue Competition.

Over the years, the local group has been involved in many major events.

“We had a major mobilisation in 1979 for the papal visit – we were involved in the Phoenix Park,” he recalls.

“We have also worked at major events like Slane, Oxigen and Electric Picnic.”

During extreme weather events, Civil Defence comes out in force to help with the emergency response.

“We support the front line services during storms like Ophelia or Emma and back during the very bad snows in 2010, 2011 and 2012.

"We transported a lot of public health nurses in our four wheel drives and brought patients to dialysis appointments.”

The organisation is involved with frontline services in planning for major emergencies and disasters including major road accidents and a few years back was involved in a simulated air disaster which took place at Fairyhouse.

One of the highlights of Michael's career was the opening last year of the new training centre at Mullaghboy.

“We have been dreaming for a home for Civil Defence since we started and this came to fruition last year with the opening of our new state of the art facility.”

Michael will be taking a well earned rest to enjoy his retirement.

“I have no major plans. I'll be trying to get healthy – I've got into some bad habits. A few people have asked me to do some things, but I won't rush into anything.

“We will see where things will take me. I have loved being part of Civil Defence for the past 47 years, so I intend to continue to have a connection with the organisation,” he says.