Long-serving Aran Islands GP Dr Marion Broderick is retiring but will continue as a medical officer for the RNLI lifeboat.
As The Irish Independent reports today, Broderick has spent 42 years working in one of the busiest offshore practices in the State.
Interviewed for the newspaper by Lorna Siggins, Broderick remembers witnessing currach crews standing up in a rolling sea to lift a patient on a stretcher over head height into an RNLI lifeboat.
That was at a time when she was responsible for all three islands and had to travel from Inis Mór, where she was based, to Inis Meáin or Inis Oírr by lifeboat and then by currach into the piers due to tidal constraints.
"currach crews standing up in a rolling sea to lift a patient on a stretcher over head height into an RNLI lifeboat"
A rural GP has to treat a patient beyond the “golden hour, " which is a particular pressure on an offshore island.
Before Irish Coast Guard helicopter crews with trained paramedics were available, she would regularly accompany acute cardiac, acute obstetric and trauma patients into the hospital by lifeboat.
She was central to the campaign initiated by Donegal activist Joan O’Doherty in 1988 to establish a 24-hour helicopter search and service on the west coast. At the time, the Air Corps could provide daylight cover only, and night-time emergencies relied on the lifeboat.
The West Coast Search and Rescue Action Campaign’s voluntary work led to the establishment of Irish Coast Guard helicopter bases, and the RNLI also opened several more stations on the Atlantic seaboard.
Poll na bPéist or the “wormhole”, the naturally formed rectangular pool or blowhole on Inis Mór, has been a “constant source of anxiety” for her – especially since it was a location for international cliff diving championships in 2009 and 2012.
While she credited the sponsors for a “well-staffed emergency and rescue plan”, she was concerned about copycat attempts afterwards.
Sure enough, she has treated two cases involving vertebral fractures and recalls how two young men dislocated their shoulders within two hours of each other after jumping in.
Even spectators to Poll na bPéist are at risk on days when it can resemble a cauldron– “days when no islander would go there”, she points out.
Read more in The Irish Independent here