Woman in her 80s hit with €1,600 fire service bill following minor crash in Donegal

A woman who scraped her car on a bridge was left shocked when she received a call-out fee of almost €1,600 from Donegal Fire Service.

The woman, aged in her late 80s, was involved in the single vehicle crash on the road from Churchill to Letterkenny in recent weeks. Another person who came on the scene called the emergency services.

An ambulance and a fire unit arrived and assessed the woman. She was uninjured, having only scraped her car. Following the incident, she got a bill of €1,588 for the call-out.

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“To say she was in a dishevelled state would be understating it,” said Cllr Michael McBride.

Cllr McBride highlighted the incident at a meeting of the Letterkenny-Milford Municipal District, as he raised a motion seeking a review of the current fees for the call-outs of emergency services to road traffic accidents.

Cllr McBride was told by the council that the cost of running the fire service has increased because of changes agreed in the 2023 Workplace Relations Commission deal for retained firefighters.

Both rostered and non-rostered firefighters can now attend and be paid for call outs, including road traffic collisions, and this is the case across Donegal.

“The cost increases now being seen are driven in the main by both increase in hourly rates of pay, (another element of the WRC agreement) as well as in many instances the greater crew compliment attending,” said a response from Garry Martin, Director of Emergency Services.

"Fire service management has no discretion in managing this outside of the National agreement framework."

Councillor McBride said: “The people that are not taken into consideration here are people who are left with these bills. It’s completely unacceptable that if somebody else calls the emergency services, you end up getting a bill like that.”

Cllr McBride said that, “to add insult to injury”, the woman was then told by her insurance company that she would not be covered because she had not made the call herself. He called for the matter to be brought before the Strategic Policy Committee and the Corporate Policy Group (CPG)

“This is not going to work,” Cllr McBride warned. “People are going to refuse to pay it and there will be more legal cases of people in car accidents receiving bills and of Donegal County Council trying to recover the money.

“It’s not sustainable, and the general public needs to know where they stand in relation to the insurance coverage they have when emergency services are called to a car accident.”