Pat Casey (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome to the Chamber our guest, John Fitzgerald, who I know for a long time and who has been at the heart of the community first responder scheme since 2004. I was first introduced to it at a public meeting in Bray in 2003 and my own community in Laragh and Glendalough was one of the first within Wicklow to get up and running in 2004. I also welcome Celine and Jason who are not from my neck of the woods, one is from Cork and the other is from Dublin so we have a broad range. To come all the way from Cork to this debate today shows what value they put on this legislation. They are the people who are volunteering, who are out there doing the work for us and saving lives. That is what an AED does. It saves a life. It is not a piece of equipment, not a television or a microwave oven. There are several people alive today because of that piece of equipment. To say that it is covered under current legislation is not doing it justice.

This Bill originated from my colleagues, Dr. Keith Swanick, and Senators Gallagher, Wilson and Daly on foot of a defibrillator being smashed on Arklow Main Street in Christmas week 2016 which was captured on CCTV. The culprits were apprehended but nothing could happen because it was a piece of equipment. It was not worth going after. This is why we have to differentiate life-saving equipment from other pieces of equipment. It does what it says on the tin. It saves a life and we must value that life. Damage to life-saving equipment must have consequences. To say it is the same as another piece of equipment is no longer acceptable.

We have asked community first responders to go out and save lives, especially in our rural communities where it will probably be 30 to 45 minutes before ambulance services arrive. We know the importance of early intervention. We talk about the chain of survival, early access, early intervention, but the third one is defibrillation. What if in the morning in my community somebody was to have cardiac arrest, we intervene and get to stages 1 and 2, and somebody goes to Willie McCoy's shop to get the defibrillator off the wall to bring it back to save that life, only to find that somebody has robbed or smashed it? The person who has had the cardiac arrest is probably not going to survive and will not get to the hospital in time. We know there is a ten-minute window. For every minute that is wasted without intervention there is a further 10% chance of not surviving. So we have a ten-minute window.

Because of community involvement we are seeing AEDs everywhere today. This is happening because of the education of us as a public. Even in this House when we came back after Christmas, every floor and every corner now has an AED. It is not just that community first responders can use them anymore. People in society, because of their work over the years, can intervene in an instant, but they must know where the AED equipment is, and when they go there they have to know it is going to be intact so that they can use it to save a life. I more than hope, I insist that the Government treats this Bill seriously in the spirit in which it was drafted and takes on board what we are saying. If there are issues regarding the drafting of the legislation let us address them, but let us not lose this Bill because of what I would call bureaucracy. This is required. Community first responders in Ireland are asking for it. We ask them to go out on a voluntary basis to save lives for us, and the least we can do is acknowledge them, recognise what they are doing and implement what they are asking us to do.