Thats like the mandatory one day course that all bus and lorry drivers must do every year. At a cost to themselves of course.

You have to do if for the ‘cert’. But as a mate said: “Loada lads, half of them without a word of english, sitting in a class for a day, getting a safety cert for something they are not even tested in afterwards. What could go wrong?”

We like our ‘courses’ in Ireland so we do. These certs keep trainers in jobs and officialdom get to pretend they are doing something proactive. Imagine a safety course with no theory or practice test at the end??? Just pay the money and get the cert and sure now its all cushdy

Plenty of minor quays & harbours around the country & weren’t National Ambulance Service unable to find Wexford Quay six months ago. But hey lets settle for mediocrity… It’s what we do.

Let me guess loc8 codes would solve the problem.

Good guess…

So what your saying Get Lost, is that since the foundation of the state that emergency services have been unable to find beaches, quays, cliffs, harbours. People must be dying in their droves at these locations for the want of guided assistance. Your stubborn, outdated, ignorant rant is a pathetic insult to the work of the Coastguard, Lifeboat volunteers (God bless their bravery and commitment) and all the state emergency services who do so much. After months of you shoehorning your agenda into everything here on the Journal I really wish you would do exactly as your name implies and, GET LOST.

Anthony this is not about the emergency services finding places. This is about the public being able to accurately able to report the position of a casualty to the emergency services. We had, and still have the opportunity too introduce a code that can help with that.

Small story for you. October last year while out on a family cycle wife had an accident on a main road and ended up unresponsive. I asked a passerby to call 999 but the passerby didn’t know where we were to tell the operator. Now ECAS can take a Loc8code but NAS do not.

The woman passed here phone to me and i had by that time already used the Point8 app got generate a Loc8code with 6m accuracy buy by the time the phone had been passed to me the call had switched from ECAS to NAS.

Thinking i was still on to ECAS i called out the Loc8 code using the phonetic alphabet giving a quick and precise location. NAS operator said to me “Where did you get that? Google???” i responded that it was a Loc8 code and he said “we don’t use them”

So i responded that we were approximately 2km north of lucan on the Clonee road. NAS operator said sorry I don’t know where that is, WHAT COUNTY ARE YOU IN.

Eircode cannot help in this scenario repeated many times a day all over the country. If you cannot see the value of Loc8 code in this scenario you are a moron.

Ultimately we have a situation where the Department of Communication is hindering rapid access to causalities with their protectionist agenda towards the UNTESTED and half baked Eircode political postcode.

Also Vodafone had a serious outage yesterday so their data network was down. This means for anybody on the Vodafone network EIRCODE was totally unusable….enjoy.

First, and most importantly, I sincerely hope that your wife has made a full recovery from her injury. It obviously has had a deep and frightening effect upon you as it would with anyone.
I certainly see and understand your point.
Speaking as a former member of the rural emergency services, we trained and studied our butts off learning our area and in rural Ireland we have so many Gurteens and Newtowns and small unheard of towns lands. The 999 controllers are so expert at gathering information from panicked and frightened callers. They relay the often scant info to the crews and the crews know from our training and dedication, who, where and most importantly how quickly to get to the incident. Oversight from Government and EU showed that our response times and incident locating ability before Loc8 or Eircode were to be commended. We did often take GPS coordinates too. No system is perfect even the UKs postcode is flawed some 30 or more years into it.
However, in this tragic story Eircode or any other locating media is not mentioned, nor was there a difficulty locating the casualties location I believe.

Thanks Anthony. Suspected broken ribs and a bit dazed. She was unresponsive because she was badly winded. I managed to get her back on her bike and through a park to a retained fireman buddy who looked after her as she went into shock and i went to get the car to collect the kids 3 & 5 who were with us. 5 year old was distraught as his mammy crashed trying to avoid him and at one point he thought she was dead. Now my fireman buddy is actually the person who came up with the name GetLostEircodes and he also designed the logo. He also told me of 2 incidents last year in the park we had just traversed. One where a man jad just had a heart attack and emergency services couldn’t find him…he died. The other some teenagers had broken into a skateboard park after hours and had fallen badly breaking his collar bone in such a way as to nearly bleed to death.. again emergency services had great difficulty finding him. Gary Delaneys Loc8codes can be put on existing signs in parks or on posts on waymarked trails such as wicklow way, mayo greenway or even canals. More tech savvy can use their smartphone. Loc8 is tried tested and proven and is used by disaster planners for that reason. It was for example used to close off roads during the Manx Air crash. Don’t for one minute think that Rabbitte, White, Naughten or the department have any interest in assisting emergency services who were never consulted at all on Eircode. DCENR have been actively trying to scupper Gary since 2010 and we are all the poorer as a result. My point in this story is there are hundreds of minor harbours, quays and jettys on both our coastal & inland waterways and they will never get an Eircode. A simple Loc8code on a Quay wall or fence post will identify the location accurately saving valuable time. DCENR are now promoting app with non hierarchical random What3Words from UK…anybody but Loc8.

Yes, Glad it was not a very serious injury. Scary one especially as you had young children to manage too, as I said I fully understand where your coming from.
And agree!
Loc8 is superior as long as one has a device that’s working etc. It’s a good system and I suspect that the Eircode was well in play and probably deals done with vested interests before Loc8. They had been rattling on about Eircode in the late 80′s. Using inferior or not using alternative information sources or being open to using better information in emergency situations is criminal.