Bonmahon Coast Guard settling into €5.2m base
- Dermot Keyes
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
IT’S a breezy mid-February night on the Copper Coast. Thankfully, for the six volunteers present at Bonmahon Coast Guard’s €5.2 million headquarters, all is quiet both on land and at sea.
Acting Officer In Charge (OIC) Bryan Reville extends a warm handshake before taking me on a tour through the 50,000 square feet, custom-built station, which was officially opened by Ministers Patrick O’Donovan and Jack Chambers in December 2023.
In just 30 weeks, the wedge-shaped building was delivered by Flynn Management Contracting Ltd on the site of the former Coastguard Station which overlooks Bonmahon Beach and the mouth of the River Mahon.
To the front of the site stands an echo of the past - the old Rocket Cart House - the only surviving remnant of the original station house which was set on fire during the Civil War and later demolished.
The magnificent new station, the first new Coast Guard construction project in a decade, is the literal manifestation of a local lifesaving tradition which now proudly spans three different centuries.
“We know how lucky we are.”
“We know how lucky we are to have a facility like this at our disposal,” said Bryan, a resident of nearby Kill and Coast Guard volunteer for the past 11 years. “It’s an absolutely phenomenal building.”
The station consists of an Emergency Operations/Conference Room (complete with big screen) and associated tea station, a plant room, an extensive indoor garage with space for three Cliff Rescue Vehicles, WCs, shower/changing rooms, storage areas, an IT comms room/radio desk along with external service compounds.
The new station, which also features a paved car parking area, is concealed from the adjacent cul de sac (which features several private dwellings) and has blended into its maritime setting in double quick time.
“We’ve gone from having just the rocket house and the Portakabin that we’d have trained out of to what we have now, so it’s been a phenomenal upgrade,” Bryan (pictured left) added.
“Looking back now, was it fit for purpose? I don't know – but that's what I came into when I first joined. We had a little office, the toilet, there was a shower, a tiny little kitchenette, a desk and we had heating.
“Look, it was grand. Maybe we didn't know how tough we had it in terms of facilities until we had all this around us – but what we have now is one of the best buildings of its kind in the whole country. To now be in a position where we can park three vehicles indoors is such a practical benefit; we’re not using nearly as much WD40 on the locks as we used to.”
A morale booster
One suspects the delivery of the new station must have done wonders for morale among the 16-strong group of volunteers?
“Oh, 100 per cent,” Bryan replied, before adding a caveat. “But to be fair, it’s not as if morale was down in any way yet there’s no denying the boost it provided us. Looking back to when Covid changed all our worlds, at that time, even though we were still on call, we had to abide by social distancing and then we had nowhere to train since we couldn’t be in the Portakabin since we were all in our own ‘bubbles’.
“So when this new station opened, it generated a different type of morale, it lit a bright new spark which we’ve all benefited from. From the moment you turn in here when it’s dark, with all the soft lighting guiding you in, it does feel like there’s something special here, something that our community is both delighted and fortunate to have.
“And from a purely practical perspective, just look at the level of parking we now have on site. Eighteen months ago, all the cars parked in here tonight were out on the lane where there are private properties and on the longer evenings, you’d have the local kids out playing. But that’s all been remedied now, which is another win – sure you wouldn’t even know we’re here – unless you need us!”
The training schedule
The Bonmahon Coast Guard team trains each Wednesday, with the neighbouring unit in Tramore out every Wednesday and a weekend day. Meanwhile, the search team based in Ardmore train once every 10 to 14 days. “It’s completely up to each unit how much training they feel they need to do,” said Bryan Reville. “For me, four training sessions a month – a couple of hours – doesn’t represent a big chunk out of everybody’s time.”
Liaising with their colleagues along the coast for training purposes is another key consideration for the Bonmahon unit.
“We’re talking with Tramore about a joint training exercise. If there was a cliff incident, for example, and if additional personnel were needed, it wouldn’t be uncommon for the Coast Guard to activate two units for an emergency response. So it’s useful to be able to put names with faces and to then train with each other so that we get familiar with each other’s capabilities. Because it’s worth noting that every volunteer doesn’t directly take part in climbing operations; there are some volunteers who will only deal with operations from the cliff top.”
Bryan continued: “We’re also trying to start up a search exercise with the Ardmore unit because they now have a drone, a new innovation which the Coast Guard has introduced, providing the unit with a fresh pair of eyes from a wide variety of angles. So training nights with the drone to, say, identify a ‘casualty’ in the bushes from, say, a mile away would lead us to send out two to three search teams on an exercise. Of course, we also train with other agencies including the Order of Malta, the National Ambulance Service, the Fire Brigade and we’re hoping to do a few training sessions with the Civil Defence as well. All of these sessions are great for building connections and creating more successful outcomes in the event of an emergency.”
A litany of checks
Specified maintenance officers within the unit are charged with assessing the quality of all Coast Guard equipment. “It’s an essential and vital element of our job,” said Bryan. “Our maintenance officers undertake a two-and-a-half day course where they’re trained about specific issues they have to continuously pay attention to, like the stitching on each harness we use. Of course, we all check our own gear for possible defects while we’re wearing it. And every six months, the whole van (which features a dehumidifier) is emptied out and every piece of equipment we store inside it is examined. That has to be done…We also have to get our equipment changed out periodically and if there are any defects at all (clicking his fingers), it’s gone. It’s as simple as that.
“In terms of general maintenance, everyone in the unit is assigned a particular job; for example, one member of the unit looks after our vehicles for a month: popping the bonnet, checking the fluid levels, air pressure and so on. And if there are any faults detected, we notify the vehicle owner and then get it booked in for service and/or repair.”
The nature of such work is not without its difficult days, Bryan stated. “A lot of the call-outs we receive are more tailored towards searches – and unfortunately, a lot of those end up being recovery operations, be in along the coast, back in the city on the Suir or on other inland waterways. None of that is nice but there is a sense of reward when there’s a successful recovery after an extensive search. A recovery, however heartbreaking it is for the bereaved family, at least means there’s a burial and some level of closure.”
Past memories
Memories of past operations feature on the Coast Guard Station’s walls, including the loss of the Pere Charles and Honeydew II trawlers in 2007, in which seven fishermen died.
Better days too are also recalled, including the March 2017 rescue of Gertie the labrador, who was rescued by the Bonmahon unit (assisted by their Tramore colleagues), having spent six days on a ledge near a cliff in Stradbally.
“My dad and my uncle were involved in coast watches during the (Second World) war,” said Billy Crowley, who has been a volunteer for the past 30 years, “so I’ve a long connection to this sort of work”.
He added: “Coming in here, you’d nearly feel you have to take your shoes off! To have this in place is still hard to credit, all the more so when you think about the ‘Rocket House’ being 200 years old and how confined it was in terms of space. When the Honeydew II search was ongoing, we were the search controllers and there were relations (of the lost crew) coming down from Kinsale at the time – and we didn’t even have a toilet to offer them.”
Fellow volunteer Olivia Gooney added: “The neighbours were incredibly good during the search – we had busloads of people arriving here – and they opened up their homes. There were more neighbours dropping in food and sandwiches and so on. Those were long days and nights but the local community here couldn’t have reacted more positively. Heaven forbid that there’d ever be such a tragedy on such a scale again but to have this building here now, which can welcome people in during such stressful times, can only be a help for all concerned.”
New recruits
In terms of potential new recruits, Bryan Reville clarified that volunteers come with different and varying strengths: “You don’t necessarily have to be swinging off a cliff in order to become a volunteer. What role a volunteer takes is up to the individual, whether they want to be climbing the ropes or working from the cliff-top. In a call-out or training scenario, most of the action is up on top of the cliff.
"Essentially, there’s only going to be one or two people actually working on ropes down the cliff whereas you need a team of seven or eight up on top to fulfil all the roles.
"There are certain criteria which have to be met in order to become a volunteer – if you’re living in Kilkenny, for example, geography is obviously an impediment – so proximity does matter. Male or female, it doesn’t matter – at the moment we’ve 10 males and six females on our roster but hopefully we can increase that number sooner rather than later.”
To find out more about becoming a Coast Guard volunteer, please email oicbonmahoncgu@ircg.gov.ie
This report was originally published in the Dungarvan Observer on March 21st, 2025
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