Adventurous volunteers sought for Donegal Mountain Rescue

Laura McFadden has been a member of the team for four years now and has been the voluntary public relations officer for two years. She shared her experience with the ‘Journal’ as the organisation invites new people to join the team.

“I absolutely love volunteering with the team,” Laura said. “It can a lot of work at times but it’s totally worth it. Everybody on the team is fantastic and it’s a really practical approach to the whole team. Everyone’s very empathetic and, because it’s voluntary, everyone does the best that they can, when they can. There’s a very inclusive, appreciative vibe within the team. It’s a lovely environment to work in.”

The DMRT have opened a new recruitment drive with the hopes of more volunteers joining the team. They are especially looking for people with search and rescue experience and first aid training but Laura assures that plenty of training is involved.

“We tend to train a minimum of twice a month, it’s usually an evening during the week and all day on a Sunday. We do everything from rope work, casualty care, first aid and navigation. We do scenario training as well, which is like a mock call-out and it just puts everything that we learn into practice on the hill. We tend to go to certain hot-spots where call-outs would be quite frequent, like Muckish or on Errigal. We try and stay as familiar as we can with the more popular areas.

"You have to be quite fit to volunteer because even the bags we have to carry can be anywhere between 16 and 20 kilos. You have to get to the casualty as safely as possible, but also as quickly as possible so you have to be ready to scale a mountain carrying weight on your back. Your own personal fitness has to come into it because you're not training every day."

As the team is completely voluntary, Laura says there is a lot of flexibility when it comes to volunteering hours.

“You can only do what you can so if there's a call out and you're unavailable, then you're unavailable. That's why we're doing a recruitment drive at the moment, to get more people on the team so we can share the load. The more people we have, the more overall availability that we'll have as a team.

"We have members based in Letterkenny, we have members based in Derry, in Strabane, we have members based in Ardara so we are spread all over. If we get a call out to Muckish, those based south of Donegal come up too and we have volunteers in Inishowen who hop in their cars to travel to call-outs. We cover every part of Donegal so you can join no matter where you're based.

“It's lovely to really feel like you give back to the community and you're here for the community. I personally, get a lot from it because it's voluntary and it's 100% my choice to volunteer my time and my efforts to it. It's fantastic, it's really worthwhile. The team are brilliant, everyone involved in the team are lovely to work with and all the skills that you obtain are invaluable.

"Anybody who's looking to find out more information or is thinking about potentially joining the team can get in touch. We are asking specifically for those that have experience or qualifications on the mountain or anybody with first aid experience, any EMTs, paramedics, even any doctors or nurses or anybody who would feel like they would be willing to give up even a small portion of their time.”

For more information on Donegal Mountain Rescue Team, email Laura at [email protected] or follow the team on Facebook.