Michael Fitzgerald has spent more than 46 years with the RNLI, but he would probably be the last person to describe what he has done as remarkable. The Launch Authority at Arklow Lifeboat Station speaks instead about the people who inspired him, the volunteers who serve beside him and the generations who quietly answered the call long before he did. It is a perspective that says as much about the RNLI as any rescue story ever could.
Listen to the radio show here (July 13th)
Fitzgerald officially joined the RNLI on 1 September 1980, just on his seventeenth birthday, making him one of the youngest crew members in Ireland at the time. Looking back, however, it becomes obvious that his story began many years earlier. Growing up less than 250 yards from Arklow Lifeboat Station, the lifeboat was simply part of everyday life. He knew the fishermen, spent hours around the quay and was fascinated by the boats. One man in particular, Michael O’Brien, a local fisherman who later became coxswain, took the young Michael under his wing, inviting him out fishing and patiently explaining how everything worked.
“That man would open the door and bring me around and show me the lifeboat,” Fitzgerald says. “When he realised I wasn’t going to grow out of it, he spent more time teaching me things that stood to me further down the line.”
When Michael O’Brien eventually brought the teenager into the lifeboat station to sign the membership forms, there was only one obstacle. Because he was under seventeen, his parents had to give permission. His father signed immediately. His mother needed rather more persuasion, something Fitzgerald understands only too well today. The sea had already left its mark on the family. An uncle, also named Michael Fitzgerald, had been injured while serving as a sailor during the 1950s before settling in Arklow and joining the lifeboat crew himself. It was another reminder that the sea gives no guarantees.
Asked what first drew him towards the RNLI, Fitzgerald’s answer is revealing because it has nothing to do with adventure.
“I’ll give you the way I look at it,” he says. “On a horrendous night, when you’re lying in bed, you’re hearing the wind howling and the rain hopping off the window, there’s a comfort in the fact that you know there’s somebody somewhere ready to jump out of their bed at that hour of the night to assist my brother, my uncle, my friend, your friend, your brother, your uncle, without giving it a second thought.”
It is such a simple observation that it almost passes unnoticed, yet it captures the essence of the RNLI better than any mission statement could. Across Ireland and the United Kingdom, hundreds of volunteers are prepared to leave the warmth of their homes, whatever the hour and whatever the weather, to help people they have never met. For most of us, that reassurance is something we rarely stop to think about until the day we need it.
His fascination with the lifeboat service stretches back even further. As a small boy sitting in the family garden, he remembers hearing an enormous explosion echo across Arklow. Before pagers and mobile phones, the lifeboat crew were summoned by firing a maroon, an explosive device that alerted volunteers the lifeboat was required.
“I’d ask my mother, ‘What’s that noise?’ She’d say, ‘That’s the lifeboat getting called out. Say a prayer for them.'”
Long before he ever wore an RNLI lifejacket himself, those words had become part of his childhood. Looking back now, he says, “I don’t think I found the lifeboat. I think the lifeboat found me.”
Training in those early years was practical, demanding and rooted in experience. Many of the older crew had spent their lives at sea as fishermen and sailors. Fitzgerald was different. He was an apprentice electrician and one of the first from what he describes as the next generation. Yet the older men never treated him as an outsider. Instead, they passed on knowledge accumulated over decades, teaching him not simply how to handle the boat but how to become part of the crew.
There was little room for excuses. One of his earliest jobs was cooking breakfast aboard a fishing boat with a coal fired range while the vessel rolled heavily in rough seas. Trying to fry eggs and rashers as hot grease sloshed across the pan was challenge enough. Trying to do it while feeling desperately seasick was another matter altogether.
“I’d run up the ladder trying to get a breath of fresh air,” he says. “One of the crew would say, ‘What are you doing? Get down and cook that breakfast. We’re waiting on it.'”
He tells the story with obvious affection because those lessons were never really about breakfast. They were about responsibility. Everybody had a role. Everybody contributed. The experienced crew expected standards because they understood that one day the young apprentice might be the person someone else’s life depended upon.
That philosophy remains unchanged, even though the composition of the crew has evolved.
“We’re all the one crew,” Fitzgerald says, explaining that today’s volunteers come from every imaginable profession. Electricians, plumbers, mechanics, engineers, office workers and women now serve alongside sailors and fishermen. Technology has changed dramatically over the decades, but teamwork has not.
One rescue in particular illustrates both the danger and the quiet professionalism that defines the RNLI. A cargo vessel issued a Mayday during storm force ten conditions, with gusts reaching force eleven. As the lifeboat launched, the sea was already breaking over Arklow’s harbour piers.
“We went through the piers and the sea was breaking over the tops of them,” Fitzgerald says. “The lifeboat was literally rolling from one window to another.”
The ship’s captain feared being driven onto the notorious Arklow Bank, a narrow stretch of sand responsible for countless wrecks over the centuries. The RNLI crew remained alongside the vessel, eventually persuading the captain to turn north towards the calmer waters off Wicklow, where both vessels finally found shelter.
Listening to the account, it is impossible not to picture the contrast between the 14 metre lifeboat and the much larger cargo ship battling mountainous seas. Yet Fitzgerald’s focus is not on the conditions or the danger.
“It was a comfort for them to see you there alongside them.”
That sentence says everything. Sometimes rescue is measured not only in what a lifeboat can physically do, but in the reassurance its presence provides.
Even when speaking about one of the RNLI’s most famous rescues, Fitzgerald again shifts attention elsewhere. He tells the story of his mentor, Michael O’Brien, who as coxswain led the rescue of the trawler Jade Star Glory after it struck rocks south of Arklow during hurricane conditions in January 1974. With one life raft overturned and another filling rapidly with water, the Arklow crew rescued every person aboard.
When the RNLI inspector later asked Michael O’Brien what conditions had been like, his answer was beautifully understated.
“It was a bit bumpy.”
Fitzgerald laughs as he tells the story, but it perfectly captures the understated culture that seems to run through the organisation. Heroics are rarely discussed. Attention is always directed elsewhere. That extends beyond the crews themselves.
“The fundraisers were there as well, and your husbands and wives, your partners, they’re all part of it,” he says before reading a moving poem dedicated not simply to all lifeboat crews past and present, but to everyone who makes the service possible.
Ship of Life
John T. Baker (1917- 2006)
Along the shore I spy a ship
As she set out to sea;
She spreads her sails and sniffs the breeze
And slips away from me.
I watch her fading image shrink,
As she moves on and on,
Until at last she’s but a speck,
Then someone says, “She’s gone.”
Gone where? Gone only from our sight
And from our farewell cries;
That ship will somewhere reappear to other eager eyes.
Beyond the dim horizon’s rim, resound the welcome drums,
And while we’re crying, “There she goes!”
They’re shouting, “Here she comes!”
We’re built to cruise for but a while
Upon the trackless sea
Until one day we sail away into infinity.
The RNLI, after all, is entirely dependent upon voluntary support. Whether someone puts a euro into a collection box, leaves a legacy in their will, volunteers in a shop or launches a lifeboat into a winter storm, every contribution forms part of the same chain stretching back more than two centuries.
As the RNLI celebrates over 200 years of saving lives at sea, Fitzgerald reflects that while radar, satellite navigation and electronics have transformed rescue operations, two things have remained constant.
“The volunteer is the constant,” he says. “And the other constant is the sea. The sea hasn’t changed.”
Perhaps that is why his story resonates so deeply. Michael Fitzgerald would never describe himself as extraordinary. Neither, one suspects, would any of his colleagues. They see themselves simply as volunteers doing a job that needs doing. Yet listening to him speak, it becomes impossible not to recognise the quiet courage that exists all around our coastline, carried not by superheroes but by ordinary people who hear the pager, leave their homes without hesitation and head towards danger while the rest of us hope we never have to.
That, perhaps, is the true story of the RNLI. Not dramatic heroics or daring rescues, although there are plenty of those, but an enduring commitment by ordinary people to do extraordinary things simply because someone, somewhere, may need them.
