Gerry Fitzgerald

They're based in Croome down in County Limerick and we aligned with them and what they do, they empower community first responders with full medical equipment.

So all that equipment was supplied by Critical Emergency Medical Response to us.

to enable us to go to treat people.

And we treat everything from strokes, chest pains, cardiac arrests, choking calls.

And we have all the technology with us in our medical bags to deal with those and hopefully try and stabilize the patient to the extent that we can wait for an ambulance to arrive.

Once the National Ambulance Service arrives on scene, they are the professional medicals.

They are the people in charge.

We would normally do a handover to them and give them the information that we've gathered off that patient.

We hand that over to them.

more often than not, they will ask for assistance from us while they're still there.

We discussed that when we set up our scheme in Carrick and Shure and the scheme was set up by two friends of mine, one from the Red Cross called Adam Hunt and the other one from the National Ambulance Service.

He's a paramedic called Danny Dowdle.

Two fantastic people who set up the scheme.

So we decided that for us it wouldn't be feasible because we all have day jobs.

We all work

So it's whoever is available at the time goes.

99.9% of the time we get to all calls and we get there within 10 minutes.

So we have a radius in Carrick and Shure of 10 kilometres.

Geographically, Carrick is situated between Kilkenny, Watford and Tipperary.

So it's three counties there that we cover within 10k of the town.