Toddler’s survival hailed a miracle

Date Published: 16-Feb-2010

The father of a toddler who almost died after falling into a pool of water beside an open drain at Carrowbrowne halting site has blamed Galway City Council for what happened to his child.

Twenty month old Packie Delaney is thought to have been on his way to visit his grandmother’s caravan close to his home at Carrowbrowne when he fell into a body of water near a drain on which the council had been carrying out work.

He was missing for some 15 minutes before his father Tom Delaney spotted his foot breaching the surface of the pool. “He normally would just play around outside the door but I had a feeling come over me that something was wrong and I looked out and couldn’t see him,” he said.

“We thought he’d have gone over to his grandmother’s and we searched all around until into a six-foot pool of sewerage water and a little shoe is all I could see.”

Packie was not breathing when he was rescued from the water and Tom’s brother, John Paul performed CPR on the toddler in an attempt to resuscitate him. “He coughed but he still wasn’t breathing, so I kept breathing into his lungs as we were bringing him into the hospital,” recalled Mr Delaney.

He said that his brother was informed by Accident and Emergency staff at UHG that the child had “passed on” and that there was no more that they could do, but doctors managed to revive the youngster and he was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit.“

He was in a coma for nearly a week,” said Mr Delaney. “Doctors were shocked that he made a full recovery because they had told me that he would be brain-damaged if he survived at all. He’s a strong little man,” he added.

Read more in today’s Connacht Sentinel