‘There is an awful lot more we can do to make the RNLI more welcoming for women’

Classon and her newly appointed counterpart in RNLI Scotland, Jill Hepburn, are the first women to hold such senior management positions across the charity’s six regions.

Ireland’s first female coxswain, Denise Lynch, was appointed to Fenit, Co Kerry, while Lisa O'Leary is a second mechanic in Wicklow, and there are four female lifeboat operations managers at Irish stations.

And Ireland now has the highest number of female volunteers proportionately among its crew, at 12pc overall.

“I don’t regard that statistic as something to be congratulating ourselves about, because I think there is an awful lot more we can do to make the RNLI more welcoming for women,” Classon says.

“We have 46 operational stations and 52 lifeboats on the island of Ireland, and only the newer stations are fitted out to accommodate both male and female crew,” she says. “We need to be more flexible-thinking in terms of how we deal with 24/7 availability, when there are very able women or men who have young children that they can’t leave at certain times of the day.”

Classon’s youngest of four sons was born when she was in the first year of her role as fundraiser for the West of Ireland in 1997. Her eldest, David, is now 36 years old, while Christopher is 34, Conor is 32 and Campbell is 24; and she has four grandchildren, Claire, Eilish, Tiernan and Lucia.

When she started with the RNLI, she was already intimately familiar with that relationship between coastal communities and their lifeboat stations — her husband, Ross, was a successful crab fisherman, working in some of the most hostile Atlantic waters between the north Irish coast and Scotland.

In 2006, she became fundraising and communications manager, working with a team of fundraisers across both Ireland and Britain. It involved spending three weeks of every month at RNLI Headquarters in Poole, Dorset. Though the commute was tough, Classon says it allowed her to build relationships that are “invaluable now in my new role”.

Four years into that job, she received a phone call she would not forget. Ross, Christopher and three Latvian colleagues were fishing off the Scottish coast on board their vessel, Ainmire, when it began taking on water. A neighbouring vessel, Our Hazel, took all five crew on board, and took Ainmire under tow, but it began listing after about five miles and sank in 100 metres of water.

Setbacks are not something that Classon dwells on, coming, as she says, from a “strong family of women”. Her father died early, leaving her mother to rear seven girls and a boy at a farm in Portnoo. Mary Angela Gillespie — “still dancing at the age of 89” — had lost her own father when she was 18 years of age, Classon says of her mother, and so resilience was second nature to her.

“My mother is more capable with a drill than anyone I know,” Classon says, explaining how her skills extend to making footstools out of beer crates. “So I didn’t lick it off the grass...”

She says her late mother-in-law, Joyce Classon, was also “inspirational” and someone who taught her to have a sense of perspective during those long weeks and months when her husband was away at sea.

In January 2015, she was promoted to head up operational policy, standards and performance with the RNLI in Poole. “I wasn’t male, or a master mariner, but policy is not necessarily about being a mariner — but about having the right processes in place and maintaining standards,” she says.

Covid-19 proved particularly challenging for an organisation that had to continue responding to call-outs, even as daily cases of the virus began to rise. “We had to develop a flexibility and an agility, due to the different requirements around Covid in the different regions, and I don’t think I ever worked as hard.”

However, it also allowed her to spend time at home with her Donegal grandchildren, to swim in the sea, to walk and “to get to know my community again”.

During that time, the RNLI was also at the centre of criticism from UKIP leader Nigel Farage over its rescue of migrants at sea. “I think our chief executive, Mark Dowie, answered that very well, in that we are a humanitarian organisation and our function is to save lives at sea and on inland waters without judgment,” she says.

Classon’s aim is to visit every station and as many fundraising branches as she can fit in over the next year; she views communication as being central to her role. “I love storytelling and cannot but be inspired by those who have a story to tell,” she says.

She is a member of the National Search and Rescue committee chaired by Yvonne Shields O’Connor, chief executive of the Commissioners of Irish Lights. One of the outcomes of the investigation into the Rescue 116 helicopter crash in March 2017 was publication of a new national search and rescue plan in 2019.

“I think my job involves bringing all aspects of the RNLI together, working through issues to find solutions, focusing on regulations and safety standards, and building our partnerships with the Irish Coast Guard, HM Coast Guard [Britain], the local authorities, Water Safety Ireland, and with the Department of Foreign Affairs for our international work,” Classon says.

“I am 57 years of age now, and in the best job of my life.”

‘We have many call-outs where the waves are washing over the boat’

Olivia Byrne, RNLI Galway

Long before she volunteered for the RNLI Galway inshore lifeboat crew, Olivia Byrne had flown to hospital with a woman in labour in the Irish Coast Guard’s Shannon-based helicopter, and knew the inside of the Aran Islands all-weather lifeboat.

Byrne, from Knocknacarra in Galway, is a public health nurse and one of the very few medical professionals volunteering with the RNLI in Ireland. The islands were part of her remit when she was based in Connemara.

“In 2003, there was an open day in the Galway station and I went down,” Byrne recalls. She explained to launching authority Pat Lavelle that she had no sailing experience, but he was interested in her medical background.

“I remember his words — ‘You might not suit us, we might not suit you, but let’s give it six months and see what happens’ — and I am here ever since!”

For the first few years, she was the only female in the station. While she turned up for the weekly training, she remembers she wasn’t asked to go out on “shouts” initially. “Then one day, a man walked into the sea off Ballyloughane Beach in Galway. I was resuscitating him all the way in, and continued as they were taking him off the boat; although he didn’t make it, they could see the value of that,” she says.

Byrne became a life support instructor, drilling the crew in resuscitation techniques. “All the crew treat cardiopulmonary resuscitation — CPR — as automatic, and they are fantastic,” she says. “It means you can tell a family everything that could be done was done.”

Search and recovery of suicide victims is, unfortunately, a large part of the work of the city-based inshore lifeboat. Many of them are young, and it can be a harrowing experience for the volunteer crew.

“You have to get there as fast as you can,” she says, paying tribute to the helm and crew she works with. She attends funerals and contacts the bereaved family afterwards.

“I think it is a comfort when I can say that the person who didn’t make it wasn’t on their own,” she says. “And as a nurse, I feel it is very important to look after the family unit and tell them everything they want to know.”

Several of Byrne’s more unusual call-outs have involved incidents on visiting cruise ships. A woman had fractured her hip shortly after leaving St John’s in Newfoundland, Canada, and was in severe pain when Byrne and two paramedics from the National Ambulance Service treated her in Galway. In the second incident, a woman had a cardiac arrest on a smaller cruise ship. Byrne resuscitated her but knew she was too critical for the lifeboat and called the Irish Coast Guard helicopter.

She recently received a qualification in patient simulation from NUI Galway and hopes there will be a joint exercise to allow RNLI crew to replicate first-aid scenarios in the simulation centre at University Hospital Galway.

Byrne believes nurses can bring a lot to the RNLI, and would encourage colleagues to sign up — particularly those already involved in marine leisure. She does acknowledge that many shouts are in conditions that are less than conducive to watersports.

“We have so many call-outs where it is blowing a southwesterly in Galway Bay, and if there is any wind, there is a short, sharp chop on the water and the waves are washing over the boat,” Byrne says.

“One of my first trips out was in winter, and I had forgotten my gloves. Wind chill and low air temperatures meant cold set in very quickly. I didn’t say anything, but the helm took off his gloves and gave them to me. I’ve never forgotten that...”

‘When we pick up lilos, we puncture them so they can’t be used again’

Fin Goggin, RNLI Howth

Fin Goggin, from Bandon, Co Cork, is an experienced crew with Howth all-weather and inshore lifeboat and a woman who is rarely off the water. Her day job, which includes night shifts, involves driving pilot boats in Dublin Port. She swims, kayaks, paddleboards, and sails the Howth 17 class.

She also has a particular insight into the experience of emergency at sea, having been on the sail training ship Asgard II when it sank in the Bay of Biscay in 2008.

All 20 trainees on board and the five crew, including Goggin, had to take to liferafts and were picked up by two French lifeboats. The subsequent investigation commended the leadership shown by the ship’s master, Captain Colm Newport, and his crew.

“The truth is that when you have everything prepared for going to sea, you think it will never happen. So I completely get it when this happens to other people,” she says.

Goggin spent a year in Denmark as an apprentice sailmaker after the loss of the ship, making sails for two Danish square rigger ships and working with the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde.

When she returned to Ireland, she enlisted on to the Howth lifeboat panel. She is a qualified helm on the inshore lifeboat, and a trainee navigator and crew on the all-weather vessel. Many of the shouts are for pleasure craft; like Galway, Howth also has to respond to call-outs for missing people, when the outcome is not so good.

Most of the shouts for the Howth crews are not too long — usually no more than 10-15 miles out to sea. She does recall one particularly long tasking to assist two people on a yacht in a southeast gale.

“We launched in the early hours of the morning, by which time it was blowing southeast force eight to nine, and we located the yacht. It was a long, hard tow back to Howth in big seas,” she says.

Over the past two years of Covid-19, many people have discovered their local coastline — with a resulting 12pc increase in rescue call-outs recorded by the Irish Coast Guard in 2021.

“It is fantastic to see so many more people out on the water, but it also means there is a more varied water user with different levels of experience now,” Goggin says. “So you will have people on a boat with no VHF radio, relying on mobile phones which are short on battery, and people who buy paddleboards and don’t understand the wind and tides,” she says.

“We are also close to Sutton, Baldoyle and Portmarnock, where swimmers can sometimes get into difficulty due to the tidal nature of those locations.”

For all the efforts to raise awareness about water safety, people still buy lilos — which only need an offshore breeze to carry them out to sea. “We had a recent incident involving a lilo off Portmarnock,” Goggin says. “When we pick up lilos, we puncture them so they can’t be used again...”

‘I took off my heels and we went out to a sailor in a capsized dinghy’

Síle Scanlon, RNLI Ballycotton

Síle Scanlon volunteered for her local RNLI station after she was rescued. She had been kayaking just off Ballycotton with three friends when the weather deteriorated. The four were worried they would capsize in the gathering swell, raised the alarm, and were picked up by the Ballycotton lifeboat.

Her mother, Máire Scanlon, has only recently retired as second or deputy mechanic (she is still a deputy launching authority), while her dad, John, is on the shore crew. Her late uncle Fergal Walsh received a silver gallantry medal, while her cousin Eolan Breathnach and her boyfriend, Michael Kenneally, are both volunteers.

Scanlon, who works in a local pharmacy some 20 minutes from the station, says she just loves the call-outs. It is up to the coxswain to select the crew, based on experience.

“Yes, there are often calls where I’ve gone out and Michael is still standing on the quay — I just wave and say ‘See ye!’ she laughs.

“I did a Fetac course in emergency services after I left school, and on the evening of graduation we had the dinner booked in Cork,” she recalls. “The pager went off, I took off my high heels in the car, and we went out to a sailor in a capsized dinghy across the bay.

“He hadn’t been able to right the boat and was quite exhausted, so he was glad to see us. The dinner was just across from the boathouse, so I still managed to make it back over when we got in!” she laughs.

“We train Wednesday nights for two-and-half hours, and I do a bit of navigation,” Scanlon continues. “It was very hard during Covid when we didn’t have training, and wearing the mask under the helmet visor is not easy at all...

“My longest call was four years ago, when we launched for a yacht that was nearly 100 miles off,” she recalls. “Very soon, there was no mobile reception, and I was meant to be babysitting. I couldn’t make the phone call to say I wouldn’t be there. Luckily, my mum realised and let them know. We were 14 hours at sea...”

‘Everyone was so welcoming, I felt I had been there all my life’

Nadia Blanchfield, RNLI Fethard

Nadia Blanchfield grew up on the River Barrow in Co Laois, but Fethard, Co Wexford, where her family spent holidays, became her second home.

She is currently undertaking a PhD in Gaeltacht business development at the South East Technological University, and decided to volunteer for the Fethard lifeboat during the first year of Covid-19.

“I had been living in Fethard for 10 years and wanted to get more involved with the local community,” she recalls. “I spoke to the lifeboat operations manager, who told me I didn’t need prior boating experience.

“So at first there was no training, which felt like a type of limbo. But when it started back up, everyone was so welcoming, and I felt I had been there all my life.

“I am just a five-minute drive from the station, and it is a busy tourist spot,” Blanchfield continues. “We have a Jeep, so we can launch the lifeboat anywhere along Hook Head.”

Her mother, Siani, who is half-Russian, half-Welsh, grew up in Dale in west Wales, where her father — Blanchfield’s grandfather — had a fishing vessel.

Siani is “the station’s best asset”, her daughter says, as she regularly drops food down to the station on training days, and there is nothing quite like her hot homemade soup and rasher sandwiches. Her sister, Natasha, has also recently signed up as a volunteer.

Blanchfield’s first shout was in June 2021 when a small fishing vessel lost power. “It was a lovely day — we nearly boiled in our drysuits — and so we had a swim afterwards,” she recalls. Several months later, conditions were very different, with thick fog, when the inshore lifeboat had to take a drifting small vessel in tow and navigate busy shipping lanes.

Blanchfield feels the station crew are like an “extended family”, and loves the training sessions, which take place once or twice a month.

“Between the boat, shore and operations teams, everyone has been brilliant,” she says. “My only regret is that I didn’t join sooner...”