It was a wet and stormy night in Gortahork, Donegal when Charlie Cannon died.

For eight minutes.

Before he came to life again.

Shocked and amazed, people around him wondered –  had they just witnessed a miracle?

But before answering that question, let me take a step back in time.

The Loch Altan Hotel on the main street of Gortahork, a charming little town in northwestern, was lively with people on the fateful evening Charlie Cannon died.

It was a holiday weekend and the hotel was packed with revellers enjoying a few leisurely days of freedom. Well-deserved time away from noisy alarm clocks, traffic and work in offices, schools, building sites and other places.

These same revellers included Charlie who was enjoying a friend’s 60th wedding anniversary celebration in the hotel’s main restaurant.

Nearby, in the bar area, members of the Tulleybegley Walking Club including old friends Mickey McHugh and Eddie Curran were also enjoying themselves, having a few well-deserved drinks after finishing a 20 km cross-country trek known as ‘the pilgrimage walk,’ named after a century-old burial tradition whereby eight-men shifts carried coffins up and down hills from surrounding areas to the nearest graveyard that distance away.

Charlie himself wasn’t drinking that night. He had a job to do. He’d volunteered to drive a couple of friends home after the celebration dinner, one of whom had an injured leg and could only walk with the help of a cane.

Being wet and stormy outside, Charlie decided, in his selfless way, to walk to the car park across the road and drive his car to the front entrance of the hotel. Thus saving his friends from getting soaked in the rain.

Having done this, Charlie then went back inside the hotel and brought his two friends to the car. Then opened the passenger door to help his friend with the bad leg get inside.

That’s when it happened. 

“Sudden terrible pain, then I simply dropped to the ground,” he recalled vaguely, not actually remembering anything until two days later in hospital.

Meanwhile elsewhere in the hotel, Mickey and Eddie had moved into the lobby to chat. Hearing a commotion they looked up and saw Charlie‘s body flat on the ground. They rushed over and with the help of others lifted Charlie’s body and brought him further into the lobby, laying him down on the carpeted floor.

Their quick-thinking worked wonders.

Though trained in basic emergency medical skills as members of a local volunteer group known as ‘First Responders,’ they knew a much more experienced person was in the bar area.

Pushing their way through the doors, they found their fellow hiking colleague Hugo McFadden, 60, an Instructor Safety Diver at Effective Offshore, training officer with Sheephaven Diving Club and one of the founding members of the Falcarragh ‘First Responder’ group ten years ago, with two others, Shaun Boylan and Maureen Gallagher.

Together, Shaun, Mickey and Eddie rushed out of the bar to the hotel lobby where a large crowd had now gathered around Charlie’s inert ‘dead’ body.

I use the term ‘dead’ because when he knelt down beside him, Hugo couldn’t find a pulse. Charlie’s heart had stopped.

In ordinary circumstances, that should have been the end of this story. Charlie’s body would’ve been moved to a morgue somewhere, probably in a hospital. Then later, buried. 

But these weren’t ordinary circumstances.

Well-trained in emergency medicine, Hugo shouted for someone to find him a defibrillator, or Automated External Defibrillator (AED), as they are formally known. Blank stares indicated most people didn’t know if there was one. Or if so, where it might be. Fortunately, Orla the hotel receptionist then, did. Snatched from the wall where it hung, it was rushed to Hugo, still kneeling beside the motionless body of Charlie.

Recalling that frantic scene, some people told me the eight minutes that followed seemed like eight hours.

Hugo started chest compression. No pulse. Moving people around him further away, he placed the paddles on Charlie‘s chest, sending an electric shock through him to kick-start his heart. Still no pulse.

He tried again. Chest compression, electric shock. Still no sign of life. It was then he heard a voice in the crowd around him saying they’d heard a cracking sound, the sound of ribs breaking. 

Luckily, it wasn’t. But even if it were…

“Our motto at ‘First Responders‘ is ‘life over limb,’ said Hugo, telling me what happened. “A cracked rib is worth less than a saved life. I’d crack a few ribs if it saved someone from death. And I wouldn’t have stopped trying for Charlie. No way.”

Unwilling to give up, Hugo tried a third time. Chest compression, electric shock. He felt again for a pulse. This time he found one. Faint, yes, but it was definitely there.

Here, deep in the heart of rural Donegal, northwest Ireland, a region known as the Gaeltacht as the first language spoken here is Irish, emergency ambulances can take around 30 to 45 minutes to get to Gortahork from the more urban areas of Letterkenny and Dungloe. Thus the crucial role played by ‘First Responders’ such as Hugo, Mickey and Eddie in saving lives.

When the ambulance carrying paramedics finally arrived at the Loch Altan Hotel, Hugo had already conducted the most crucial of life-saving interventions. 

Without Hugo‘s help and that of Margarite Meehan who kept feeling for a pulse as Hugo performed chest compressions and administered electric shocks, the 73-year-old former school bus driver and mechanic would be long buried, his loss mourned by family and friends. 

Instead, Charlie is alive and well, spending the festive holidays with his 92-year-old Aunt Una in Mayo, a place he drove to a few days ago. 

“If I was back in Donegal, sure I’d be climbing to the top of Errigal with my son, John Paul,” he hold me in a telephone conversation earlier this week.

A daily walker, usually in the company of his little terrier dog, aptly named Tiny, Charlie, now 73, is also an avid cyclist and an expert restorer of vintage 19th-century bikes nicknamed ‘High Nellies,’ the name referring to its tall riding position with a very large front wheel and a much smaller rear one. More commonly known as ’penny-farthings,’ Charlie sometimes jaunts around on one in the area where he lives in the townland of Stroughan. So fit is he, six weeks ago, with his nephew, Patrick Darcy, he climbed Muckish Mountain. No easy task for anyone, never mind a man who, Lazarus-like, rose from the dead. Sadly, Charlie lost his wife of 47 years, Kathleen, to cancer. But he tries to keep his head up.

“Hugo’s my hero,” he said, a catch in his voice. “And the others too, the ‘First Responders’ who saved my life. If it weren’t  for them, I wouldn’t be talking to you. I wouldn’t have seen another Christmas, another New Year. Instead here I am, enjoying life. There’s not enough words to thank them for what they did for me.”

As I sip my spiced brandy on this frosty winter evening, I ponder…why wait for the festive Christmas and New Year season to celebrate unsung heroes like Hugo, Margarite, Mickey, Shaun, Maureen and Eddie, and all those ‘First Responders.’ Such selfless people are all around us, every single day, especially in close-knit rural communities, quietly helping their fellow Man along the path of Life, without fear or favour. 

‘First Responders’ a purely voluntary group of local people who help fellow citizens in emergency health situations, are seeking new members. Do you want to help your community? Perhaps save someone’s life? If so, then contact falcarraghdefib@gmail.com or Mobile 0861013304. You could make a big difference. And feel tremendous satisfaction doing so.