All-terrain wheelchair opens up the pleasures of spending time at the seaside to people with walking difficulties
DECKCHAIRS. PICNIC baskets. Buckets and spades. Windbreaks. Frisbees. Surfboards. Of all the objects we take for granted on Irish beaches during summer time, wheelchairs are very probably not one of them. Think about it. Wheelchairs, particularly as they have become lighter and easier to self-manoeuvre, have narrow wheels that lodge in soft surfaces and quickly get stuck there.
But if you go to Kilkee beach in Co Clare this summer, you’ll see what Pat Lillis believes to be the only publicly available beach-accessible wheelchair in the State. Lillis, who is the communication area manager for the Brothers of Charity in Clare, is responsible for bringing the Deming De-Bug All Terrain Beach Wheelchair to Kilkee.
“As far as we know, it’s the only one in Ireland,” reports Lillis, sitting on the low sea wall outside Dave Neville’s NevSail watersports hut on Kilkee beach. Curious passersby are stopping to look at the beach wheelchair, which is temporarily based at the hut until the Brothers of Charity find a permanent location for it.
The eye-catching wheelchair, which weighs only 18kg (40lbs), looks like a cross between a moon-buggy and a four-wheeled ball-barrow. It’s all in the wheels. The two front ones are the size and shape of beach balls, and the back pair are a smaller version. They all have very low ground pressure, and thus the weight is distributed across a bigger surface, enabling it to pretty much float across the sand.
“We were trying to put together a project that combined disability, access and tourism,” Lillis explains. Two local women, Kate Duffy and Deirdre Carmody, ran the Cork City Marathon last year, and raised €1,700 for the charity – money that was specifically delegated to be used for a transport initiative in the region.
“It was serendipity that gave us the idea, really,” says Lillis. Doing some research on the internet led them by chance to a YouTube clip of a De-Bug wheelchair in use.
There are various types of all-terrain wheelchairs, but this particular one was invented in 1994 by American Mike Deming for his wife, Karen, after whom the chair is named. After a car crash in 1990, she became quadriplegic. Prior to the crash, she had loved active watersports. Her husband invented the De-Bug chair, so that she could still have mobility on the beach. (The chairs are not intended for use in the water.)
The chair cost about €1,700. Some features are extra, such as the holder for a bottle or cup (€80) and the headrest (€300). It arrived earlier in the summer, and since the beginning of July, has been on the beach outside NevSail each day.
It’s free to use for anyone in a wheelchair, although they don’t yet have the facility to transfer a quadriplegic person into it, as this requires a hoist, and, insists Lillis, “privacy for a dignified transfer”. They are hoping to get the use of a nearby building sometime in the future to provide this additional facility.
Meanwhile, anyone who is able to use a transfer board, or be safely helped from their own chair into the De-Bug, is welcome to take the chair down the beach. It is not self-propelling, but so far, those who have used it have all had friends or family members who have pushed them along the curved flat yellow sands of Kilkee beach.
The first person to have tried out the chair when it first arrived comes back to demonstrate it in action. She is local woman, Patricia O’Dea, who is a long-term wheelchair user due to spina bifida. Although she has lived within sight of the ocean all her life, she says using the beach wheelchair brought her “the closest I’ve ever been to the sea”.
Antonio Cebas, co-ordinator of the Brothers of Charity services, pushes O’Dea up and down the beach, close to the water’s edge. Two things are immediately obvious. The chair glides easily across the sand, and both O’Dea and Cebas are spontaneously grinning. The other is that the chair is attracting attention all across the beach. Children stop digging holes or building sandcastles, people stop what they’re doing to look on curiously, and several approach to comment warmly, and ask O’Dea and Cebas where this unusual chair came from.
“There’s a bit of a chain reaction just by having the chair on the beach,” explains Cebas. “Everyone knows someone in a wheelchair; be they a sibling, cousin, relative, friend, or whoever. They come up to us, and say that they’ll tell them about the chair, and come back to use it. It’s a way of making the beach more inclusive to everyone, and about creating a different way of thinking about our environment.”
Lillis and his colleagues are also hoping it may act as an extra tourism incentive to the locality, drawing people to Kilkee who have a wheelchair user in their party, and who may be getting the first beach experience of their life.
Lillis points out that some beaches in Spain have raised wooden causeways, which allow wheelchair users closer access to the beach. He also mentions the Irish Wheelchair Association initiative in Dunamon, Co Roscommon, where several extra-wide pontoon jetties have been built out over the River Suck to facilitate wheelchair-users who want to go fishing.
“It’s all about trying to think about disability and access differently,” he stresses. “The demand for the beach chair won’t be huge at any time, but it’s also about inclusion, and getting that message across.”
The Deming De-Bug All Terrain Beach Wheelchair will be freely available on Kilkees Blue Flag beach in Co Clare every day until the end of August
