Craic On

Knocked Down

I read in today’s Journal that a woman, Maura Porter, from Carndonagh, was knocked down in Carndonagh and lay by the roadside for 50 minutes before an ambulance, coming from Letterkenny, reached her. She died in hospital.

Her family are both bereft and angry – and quite rightly so.

This is a shocking state of affairs. You would have to say that as Moville is further away from Letterkenny than Carndonagh is it would have taken even longer for the ambulance to get here.

Enquiry

This needs to be investigated and a good reason given for why it took so long. However, whatever the ‘good reason’ is it won’t be good enough as it is not acceptable that an ambulance should take 50 minutes to arrive at any destination in the country.

I must say that when my parents took ill on a couple of separate occasions when here the decision was taken by my family to drive them to Altnagalvin in pain rather than wait for an ambulance to go to Letterkenny.

I remember when my son was to be taken from the Doctor’s Surgery here to Letterkenny hospital by ambulance it took over an hour to get here. It wasn’t an emergency but it made me wonder what would have happened if it had been.

Not Safe

Moville is a great little town but it doesn’t feel safe to live here as you get older. They have been making all sorts of cutbacks to the NowDoc service at Carndonagh and at Letterkenny hospital.

What an enquiry needs to find out is what is the reason it happened, the short-term solution to the problem and the long-term solution to the problem so that it never happens again.

It must have seemed like an eternity to the Porter family in Carndonagh as they waited for the ambulance to arrive and the unease must spread unease throughout the whole area that this could happen to anyone.