It is just past midnight on Sunday morning. The air is thick with smoke; the smell is tarry and metallic.
A burnt-out car lies on the green of a Finglas housing estate on the northside of Dublin. Rubber tyre streaks are imprinted on Barry Road, like brush strokes of an abstract artist.
The Dublin Fire Brigade are deft and thorough, pumping water over the burnt-out husk. The fire is extinguished within minutes.
Trevor Hunt, a station officer with the fire brigade, sits back into his vehicle and listens to his personal radio device.
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“That’s the vehicle being reported as stolen to the gardaí there,” he says.
The car had been robbed, driven by joyriders, set alight and the fire extinguished all before its owner had a chance to report it missing. It shows the speed and intensity at which the fire brigade operate.
Back at the headquarters of Dublin Fire Brigade’s Tara Street fire station in the city centre, across the road from Trinity College Dublin, firefighters are piled in around a long table. There’s tea, biscuits and plenty of banter. It is a world away from the shell of a car on Barry Road.
Siobhan Talbot, a sub officer who has been with the fire brigade for 28 years, enjoys her role as a paramedic fire fighter.
“I love the diversity of the job, the fact that every day is different,” she says.
It’s like having a second family, she says.
The fire brigade has been encouraging more women to apply for roles in a service traditionally associated with men.
“I suppose it’s a hard job for a woman, but it’s also a hard job for a man. Not only do you have to be strong physically, but you need to be strong mentally,” she says.
The mental toll is “a hard one to quantify because everybody is different”, says acting district officer Colm Murphy.
“It does take a toll. It does add up. It is cumulative. But we have great staff support.”
There is “great psychological counselling support” in the form of the station’s critical incident stress management system, Murphy says. But he also emphasises the importance of peer to peer support in the service.
“We’ve got the jokers, the messers, the person you can talk to quietly in the locker room: you’ve got a shoulder somewhere, and it’s important that you acknowledge that,” he says.
It is essential to start the conversation as soon as you leave a call-out, he says.
“I say to make sure that on your way back from an incident to start discussing it, even before you get back to station,” says Murphy.
“We call it a ‘diffusal’. You might break the ice for people or identify that one of the team isn’t having an easy a time as the rest. That’s how we deal with it.”
How many life or death situations do firefighters deal with?
“On average most operatives during a 30-year career will deal with between 2,000 and 2,500 very difficult incidents involving life-altering or life-ending situations,” he says.
Situations where someone they are helping reminds them of their own personal situation can be difficult, says Talbot.“So, to see somebody else who is in distress, whether it’s young people or old people dying and you have somebody similar at home – that’s the hard part,” she says.
Another challenging aspect of the work can be arriving at a scene where you know the person affected.
“I have been called to one or two of my colleagues over the years and one of them I didn’t recognise him until I had a chance to take it in and look at him and that was after he had been pronounced dead,” says Murphy.
“I call it ‘the blinkers’; I have a job to do. While I am being the practitioner, the rescuer, I don’t see the person; I don’t have an emotional attachment. That’s the way I deal with it. It’s the aftermath when I get to think about it or I have to break news to somebody. That can be very difficult when you know them.”
On November 23rd, 2023, crews from Tara Street station attended the scene of the Parnell Street stabbing of three schoolchildren and their carer, and the subsequent riot and arson attacks on O’Connell Street. The fire engine that was used to respond to the stabbing was ransacked hours later in the riot.
The officers are tight-lipped on what happened that night; several will be witnesses when criminal cases come before the courts.
In the control room where the phone call about the Parnell Street stabbing was received that November sits control room operative Glenn Brennan.
“We take calls for Dublin, the whole of Leinster, Cavan and Monaghan so it’s about 54 per cent of the population of the Republic that we cover for fire calls,“ he says.
The fire brigadealso provides paramedical services in conjunction with the National Ambulance Service for Dublin. They are also responsible for river rescues on the Liffey.
When an emergency call comes in, the fire brigade needs an address and a phone number; without both, they cannot send help and cannot ring back if they get cut off.
While an Eircode easily identifying a specific address is ideal, callers are often unable to provide precise details because they are “panicking”. In those circumstances, the fire brigade operators work backwards.
“With the rurals, if they can’t give the address, we want the townland. We will always get the family name of the people down the country because the fire crew are local, so they’d know the ‘Smiths of Ballyduff’ or something,” he says.
Brennan says they will often seek details of nearby landmarks such as the nearest GAA club or nearest pub “and we will get them as close as we can”.
Luke Reyner, a fellow control room operative, says calls can be difficult.
“A natural part of life is passing away and a good number of our calls can be apparent deaths,” he says.
“I have had back-to-back scenarios where an older person has passed away in the end stages of their life and the very next call a child born on the phone.”
“We see people in and we see people out,” says Reyner, summing up their role.
The calendar can dictate the pattern of call-outs for the fire brigade. Halloween is “a two-month event starting from September”, says Trevor Hunt.
“You also see more chimney fires in the winter obviously. In the summer there would be more rescue swimming operations and we also deal with mental health crises in the river Liffey,” he says.
Beyond these events, there are “no real trends that I can point to – it’s just always busy”.
On any given night, 20 per cent of callouts could be fire-related and 80 per cent involve paramedics being called out, Hunt says.
He notes the sad statistic that most fire deaths in Ireland are older people, with the National Directorate for Fire and Emergency Management, a section of the Department of Housing, reporting that 59 per cent of people who died in a fire in 2019-2023 were over the age of 65.
“The majority of fire deaths in Ireland are over 50s. I suppose they might have older electronics – for example, electric blankets have to be replaced every 10 years,” says Hunt.
“But all kinds of electrical items can cause a fire: electric heaters, phone chargers, frayed cables, any electrical chargers really. A laptop charging on a duvet can overheat and cause a fire, for example.”
The National Transport Authority has banned escooters on public transit due to safety concerns associated with lithium-ion batteries.
“In terms of the escooters, the reputable brands wouldn’t be fire starters. As long as something has the CE mark on it” – meaning that the device complies with European safety standards – “you should be fine if charged correctly”, he says.
“And never charge indoors,” he says.
The fire brigade has identified other problems with these vehicles, however. A worrying issue is the growing number of people involved in escooter and electric bike incidents who were not wearing helmets or were just wearing bicycle helmets. Motorcycle helmets should be worn given the speed they can travel at on these vehicles.
“They are not going at bike or scooter speeds; they are going over 35km per hour and we are seeing a lot of traumatic head injuries as a result,” says David Hoban, a control room operator.
Mr Murphy says: “Cars, escooters, and ebikes are travelling faster and faster and quieter and quieter and that’s certainly creating an issue.”
He describes these new forms of transport as “toys essentially”. The speeds at which they travel means they are being used in petty crime more and more.
This leads to “more trauma, more heartbreak, more property and infrastructural damage where there’s arson involved”, says Murphy.
“Is it a trend?” he asks. “I’d hate to think that it’s a trend that is going to increase but life and the city have changed.”
Next in the “One Night in Dublin” series: Conor Pope spends a night with bouncers at Copper Face Jacks – on Monday
