Restored fire engine bringing back memories for local team

A group of retired firefighters from Mullingar were recently reacquainted with the appliance that they used to fight hundreds of blazes in the 1960s and ‘70s.

The Karrier fire engine was based in the now closed fire station on Church Avenue from 1961 to 1984.

During its 23 years in service, it attended some of the biggest fires in the county over the last 50 years, including the blaze that destroyed the Lake County Hotel in 1975.

After almost a quarter of century in service , it was decommissioned in the mid-80s and was eventually sold to Dublin sheet metal worker and vintage car restorer Gerry Cahill in 1993.

Over the course of three years, Gerry brought it back to its former glory and until he sold it at the end of the last century, it was a regular sight at vintage shows across the country.

Fifteen years later Gerry’s son Lenny spotted the fire engine for sale on Done Deal.

It was by then in a very bad state of repair, and Gerry decided that he would restore it once again. Lenny says that his father’s head was ruled by his heart.

“He didn’t like what he saw [on Done Deal] after all his hard work.

“After the first time he’d restored, my sister, my mother and I used to go to shows all over the country on it. My mother died in 2014 so there was a sentimental side to his decision to restore it again.

“My father is 74 now and he was 71 when he started the restoration again. He didn’t get much help – he would have done 95% of the work himself.

“The engine had seized solid, but he eventually un-seized it and got it running.”

Gerry and Lenny recently brought the fire engine back down to Mullingar for an event at the Fire Station in Clonmore, attended by retired firefighters James Dowd, Tony Darcy, John Bawle and Pat O’Brien, and their friends and family.

Another former firefighter who would have used the fire engine, Patrick Nooney, was out of the country at the time of its visit.

Mr Dowd’s son, also called James, did some research on the fire engine and the period that it was in service.

He says that its return to Mullingar brought back a flood of memories for the his father and his former colleagues.

The retired firefighters also got an opportunity to compare today’s vehicles and equipment with what they used.

James says that while the work of a firefighter is never easy, regardless of the era, the general consensus among his father and his colleagues was that today’s generation have it a bit easier.

“They had to manually work the pumps. They had very basic equipment back in the ’60s and ’70s and often had to use equipment that was still in service from the ’30s and ’40s.

“It would have been a lot harder physically and mentally. At the fire in the Lake County, my father and John Bawle got trapped upstairs and had to jump from the top floor.

“They also attended car accidents. Their equipment would have been a crowbar, a hacksaw and a sledgehammer. They didn’t any proper cutting equipment until the 1980s.”

The newly restored fire engine’s visit gave the former colleagues an opportunity to relive the times they spent together serving their community.

“It was great that they could reminisce. They got to meet up and talk about the old times.

“They talked about the appliances they used, the fires they attended and the people they worked with.”