Suicide prevention patrol: ‘We said hello. There was no response. The next thing, she was in the water’

It’s just after 8pm on Friday evening, October 6th, in Limerick city centre. It’s dark already, and the Shannon river that bisects the city is black. The river is wide; much wider than the Liffey that runs through Dublin. A riverside town or city is a place with a natural amenity for its population. Boardwalks and bridges form part of the built environment. Any building with a river view has a premium price. The desire to look at flowing water is, for many, innate.

It is a fact, however, that any body of open water carries its latent threat, and a tidal river is a particularly fast-moving body of water. The Limerick Treaty Suicide Prevention (LTSP) organisation is a volunteer group of some 40 members, established in 2018. They patrol Limerick’s city-centre bridges and riverbanks from 8pm to midnight, on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. All volunteers are Garda vetted.

“Put this on,” directs volunteer John Carswell, handing me a fluorescent green jacket with reflection bands. It’s branded with the group’s name. We’re standing in their storage space in the old Cleeve’s sweet factory, where there are bikes, kit, various flotation devices and two somethings still in boxes that are apparently sophisticated drones in the form of flying lifebelts. The kit is composed of jackets, shorts or trousers (also branded), throw bags, and a harness that incorporates a personal flotation device. They wear their own boots. “It’s about €300-€400 to kit up one person,” Carswell says.

There are a dozen or so other volunteers waiting to start the Friday evening’s patrol. Liam Ryan. Pat Madigan. Dan Aherne. Declan Crowe. Mother and daughter, Mary Clare Cronin and Maria Cronin. Jacob Tierney. Sean Twomey. Peter O’Hora. James Lowe. Bridget Dowling. They split into two groups; one going clockwise and the other going anticlockwise around the three city-centre bridges.

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I join one of the groups, and start walking along with them. It’s absurdly mild for October, but they go out in all weather, all year round. Why do they do it, I ask Declan Crowe, whom I’m walking alongside. “Giving back,” he says, which is an expression other members echo over the duration of the evening.

What are they looking out for? “You might spot someone along the steps,” Crowe says. “Or you might meet the same people over the night, who are hanging around the river, and they seem unsettled in some way. We’ve been out till four or six in the morning sometimes.”

Most people I talk to over the course of the evening try to do two nights a week. Most live in or around Limerick, but one person I talk to travels from Clarecastle in Co Clare, and another lives a good 40-minute drive away in Limerick county. One person I talk to was up that morning at 5am to drive to Dublin, completed a full day’s work there, drove back to Limerick, and is now out on a four-hour patrol. “We are needed,” is the mantra I keep hearing over the evening.

The group’s method is to casually greet people they encounter sitting or standing close to the water, particularly those who are alone. “If they reply, we walk on. They’re engaging with us,” Maria Cronin says. “It’s when there is no response; that’s when we’d walk on a bit, and then look back. We’d keep an eye on them for a while, and then go back.”

Last year, the group made 225 “interventions” with members of the public along the riverside. What do they define as an “intervention”? “People openly told us they were suicidal,” Carswell says.

“There was a woman sitting at the water’s edge at the skateboard park one Friday night,” O’Hora recalls. “She was wearing a dressing gown, and there was a strong smell of alcohol from her. We said hello. There was no response. The next thing, she was in the water. She had just bum-shuffled off the quay.”

Two people managed to climb a ladder down, and pull her out between them. “She was very, very lucky she had not been swept away.” The woman told them she wanted to go in again. The emergency services were informed, and the woman was taken away by ambulance.

“We never usually know what happens next,” Aherne says.

[ The secrecy of . . . mental health ]

Each of the groups has a radio, so they can check each other’s location. They also carry strong-beam torches, which they shine at intervals into the water, and along the bridge arches. At 10pm, they stop to make a snack run to a late-night supermarket. Soft drinks and crisps and biscuits are passed around, and benches are availed of to take a rest from patrolling. Listening to the banter between the members, it’s clear they have become good friends. Like all volunteering, even for a reason as grim as suicide, there is still an element of social lives shared.

In the last few years, strings of white light bulbs have appeared along the Limerick riverside, which adds not just to the aesthetic of the city, but provides more light to the water below. Railings have been added near the skatepark, which was previously unfenced, and a notorious area for people attempting to enter the water.

I ask what kind of things they have witnessed in the past, while out on patrol.

“It was Christmas Eve, and a young girl was trying to enter the water. She did enter the water. We got her out.”

“There was a woman at the edge of the river who told us she had two kids under two, and her husband was abusive to her. She showed a female member of the group all the cigarette burns on her torso. We talked to her for a long time.”

Another: “There was a woman very upset once by the river, and one of the female members of the group spent more than an hour talking to her. A month later, they ran into each other in a shop. The woman was with her husband, who came up to the volunteer and said, ‘You saved my wife’s life that night’.”

Volunteers also sometimes have other, very personal reasons, to join the patrols. At one point in the evening, I listen as one male volunteer tells the harrowing story of losing two of his brothers to suicide. After this happened, he says that his mental health was suffering greatly. Friends did an intervention, and helped him. We stand at a traffic light, waiting for the light to change. His voice breaks, and I can see under the street light that his eyes are bright with unshed tears.

As we walk back and forth, and over the bridges, members of the public walking by say hello. Any Garda passing in a van waves out the window. There is visible support for their presence, but not everyone the LTSP encounter appreciates close attention. A woman on a bench at Arthur’s Quay park with her dog has a couple of beer bottles in a bag, and is extremely exercised at the sight of the group.

“Go away! You go away!” she shouts. It seems to me she might be confusing the group with gardaí, and is concerned her alcohol might be taken from her. The group reassure her, and retreat.

The LTSP fundraise in a variety of ways. They receive donations from the public. There are events, such as Ring of Kerry Cycle and Three Peaks in 24 Hours, that raise money. They have a van, but Carswell estimates it will take between €18,000 and €20,000 to convert the back of it into a “mobile hub” space where distressed people they meet can shelter for a time out of sight of the general public.

About 10.30pm, a garda van pulls up alongside the group I’m walking with at Honan’s Quay, and the window goes down. One of the members goes over, and then returns to share the news.

“A man’s girlfriend rang the guards to say he was highly suicidal and told her he was going to the river. She rang them half an hour ago.” A photograph of this man was shared with the group by the guards, and they study it. A radio call is made to the other group, with a description of the clothes the distressed missing man is wearing, and to ask them to look out for him too.

[ ‘When you are dealing with a mental health issue in the home, you drop out of society in some ways’ ]

Everyone is on high alert, and extra purposeful after this interaction with the guards. Torches are shone on the water. Attention is paid to the clothing men standing anywhere near the river are wearing. Some time later, a red car draws up, and the driver calls over to the patrol. He is a family friend of the missing man who left his home in distress earlier that night. He shares a new, much clearer photograph of the man. There is still no sign of him.

“Maybe he’s gone to the pub,” someone suggests hopefully.

As it happens, LTSP are not the only volunteer group in the city who do regular night-time patrols of the river with the specific purpose of attempting to safeguard potentially suicidal people. Limerick Suicide Watch (LSW), established in 2016, has an identical mission. This group has some 74 volunteers, and goes out in the evenings on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 9pm to 1am.

On Saturdays, their patrol starts at midnight, when the LTSP group finishes up, and goes on until 4am. The Irish Times has previously been twice out on patrol with the LSW, in 2018 and 2019. The LSW patrol with a minimum of between six and 10 people each night, in three groups named variously Alpha, Bravo and Charlie. Their jackets are orange, and to kit each volunteer out costs between €550 and €600, all of which comes from fundraising by the public. They have electric bikes, push bikes and a van.

The Irish Times contacted the LSW’s spokesperson and put it to them that from an outside perspective, it might make more sense to pool the two sets of volunteers, their kit, their resources, their fundraising and their time. To have one large group of volunteers available to patrol the river with the same admirable aim.

The LSW spokesperson stated that they had “no comment” in relation to this question. They then stated they did not wish to be interviewed further.

“We don’t work together at all. It would make more sense to do so,” Aherne of the LTSP says, when asked about why the two existing groups don’t join up. “But we cover the seven nights between us, and that’s the important thing.”

“In an ideal world, joining together would happen, but the other group have their own ways of doing things,” Maria Cronin says.

“There has just always been two groups,” Crowe says.

It is a puzzling fact that one voluntary organisation in Limerick city, LSW, was established in 2016 to help protect the public against potential suicide from the river, and that just two years later, an entirely separate group of volunteers was formed, the LTSP, which has the same mission.

It’s coming up to midnight, when the four-hour patrol is due to end. The red car with the family member of the missing man who came by earlier, draws up alongside again. There is a conversation at the car window.

The LTSP group don’t often get to hear the end of the stories they witness the beginnings of, but tonight, they do. The news is good. The missing man has gone home. He is safe.

If you are affected by any issue in this article, please contact Pieta House on 1800-247247 or the Samaritans by telephoning 116123 (free) or Text HELP to 51444.