Leinster House doesn't have them, Áras an Uachtaráin doesn't have them, but that won't deter Galway City Hall. If Galway city manager, Mr John Tierney, has his way, his office will soon be the safest place for an Irish politician to be.
The reason is that on Monday Mr Tierney sought local authority support to install a defibrillator on his premises as part of a campaign to reduce deaths from sudden heart attack in the west.
"We have a building here to which there is a lot of public access, and we'd like to follow the lead set by Croí, the west of Ireland cardiology foundation," Mr Tierney said.
Once the simple technology is installed, Galway City Hall will be the first public building in the State to have emergency equipment for cardiac arrest victims.
Research shows that most of these sudden arrests occur in airports, golf courses, sports complexes, shopping centres, casinos, the workplace and on board aircraft, ferries and trains. If this tends to suggest that government and local authority buildings are not exactly "high-stress" locations, Mr Neil Johnson, chief executive of Croí, wasn't intimating such when he spoke at a demonstration of the equipment in Galway yesterday morning.
The Lifepak CR Plus unit, which is about the size and price of a laptop computer, costs €2,800. With some simple training, it can be operated by non-medical people and can save lives. It does so by administering an electric shock to restore the heart's normal rhythm.
Croí is installing two of the automated units, in Galway Airport and Galway Shopping Centre, within the next month, and has already trained a core group of volunteers among staff working at both of these venues. The volunteers have also been schooled in first aid and cardiac pulmonary resuscitation (CPR), and a trained member of the public can also use the machine in an emergency. Dr Kieran Daly, consultant cardiologist at the specialist cardiac centre in University College Hospital, Galway, said early defibrillation was a critical part of the chain of survival. Pilot projects on the use of defibrillators in public places in the US have shown that survival rates can be doubled.