The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA) has called for the Eircode system of location-fixing to be extended beyond homes and businesses and into a national identification system for all land holdings.
Deputy president of the association, Denis Drennan said that it was becoming more and more obvious that farmers need access to digital area-identification system.
This system would direct either gardaí or emergency medical services to the exact location they might be required.
Eircode emergency location-fixing
Drennan, who also chairs the association’s Farm and Rural Affairs Committee, said that farms were now overwhelmingly ‘one-person’ operations.
As a result, there are no longer colleagues or other workers around who might be able to appreciate the gravity of a situation and help ‘guide in’ the emergency services, according to Drennan.
The ICMSA chair explained that it in those circumstances that what was needed was an exact location identifier which Eircode already provided for homes and businesses.
“We just think it would be so much more convenient, say, in terms of delivery to a farmyard or location not adjacent to the farmer’s house,” Drennan said.
“If we could change and extend the system to specific parcels of land then it would make the logistics of farming that much easier.
“Irish farming is noted for its fragmented structure with many farmers having multiple parcels of land, in many cases quite small parcels of land.
“With emergency services now routinely requesting Eircodes to facilitate quicker response time, it’s time to consider the possibility of serious farm accidents becoming even more serious and fraught because the field or yard doesn’t have the code that can get the response there as fast as possible,” Drennan added.
The ICMSA representative said that the same applies for the gardaí and even commercial entities who increasingly look for this identifier.
“We think that this is a straightforward option and if it saves five minutes emergency response and somebody’s arm or leg – or God forbid – their life, then wasn’t it worth it?” Drennan concluded.