Good Samaritan to the rescue after defibrillator theft

Heartless thieves have stolen a defibrillator which a GAA club had spent months fundraising for to ensure their players would have the best chance of survival in the event of a cardiac incident.

Castlegar GAA Club had raised €1,500 just a year ago to buy the machine which was stored in a locked cupboard of the referee’s changing rooms in their club complex in Roscam.

They do not know when exactly it was taken, but they discovered it was missing two months ago, said club chairman Damien Tummon.

“Sometimes the gates are left open to facilitate the refs so it must have happened on one of those occasions. We thought maybe somebody had borrowed it for some reason and forgot to return it so put up a notice on Facebook but it seems it was definitely stolen.

“We did check CCTV but could not find anything unusual,” explained Mr Tummon.

The defibrillator was taken out once for use since its purchase to help somebody in trouble at the railway track. By the time a club official brought it to the incident site an ambulance had already arrived.

Luckily enough it has not been needed since it was swiped. However the death of a 15-year-old ‘Bish’ student at the Doughiska pitches last month during a soccer match has spurred the club on to replace the lifesaving equipment.

Hassan Taiwo collapsed during a game between his team, Merlin Woods FC, and Salthill Devon and was later declared dead at University Hospital Galway.

“That death really hit us. We were thinking if that was to happen in our pitches we’d be really kicking ourselves we didn’t have the defibrillator. So we put the word out there we would have to get another one.”

A good Samaritan answered in the form of Tom Meehan, owner of the Spar Shop in Roscam, who has agreed to purchase the equipment for use by the GAA Club.

Officials in the club have decided it would make more sense from a security point of view to store the defibrillator in the shop, which is just across the road from the pitches.

“It’s awful that we can’t store something as vital as a defibrillator where we would like but having it in the Spar also means the community will have easier access to it in the event of an emergency,” Mr Tummon explained.

Castlegar GAA Club is one of the city’s biggest sports, with 80 adults and up to 400 youths regularly using its facilities

“We’re grateful to Tom Meehan that we don’t have to go out again and fundraise. But really it’s very sickening that somebody would feel the need to go and steal this.”

News of the Castlegar device follows confirmation a fortnight ago that three life buoys are being stolen or thrown into the city’s waterways every week by vandals.

An automated external defibrillator (AED) is a portable device that checks the heart rhythm. If needed, it can send an electric shock to the heart to try to restore a normal rhythm. Defibrillators are used to treat sudden cardiac arrest, where the heart suddenly and unexpectedly stops beating and can cause death if it’s not treated within minutes. Some 6,000 of the 10,000 who die from cardiovascular disease die from sudden cardiac arrest and 70 per cent of these occur outside of hospital.

“There is significant evidence to suggest that early defibrillation can have a major impact on survival rates from sudden cardiac arrest,” according the GAA’s guidelines on the use of defibrillators.