The father of a baby girl born at an Applegreen Service station in Kildare last night has said he was preparing to deliver the baby himself when paramedics arrived.

Parents Naomi Galvin and John Fearne had just returned from a check-up at the Coombe Hospital in Dublin when baby Ellie decided to make her unexpected entrance to the world.

On Newstalk Breakfast this morning, John said there were just minutes between the paramedics arriving and Ellie coming into the world.

“Squeaky bum time really doesn’t come close to what it was,” he said.

“You can imagine, it was a very dark night, it was freezing cold. It was raining on top of us and I think there was probably an eight or nine-minute period where it was just me and Naomi and I was really getting used to the fact that I was going to deliver Ellie.

“I was professionally sweating I suppose would be the best of saying it. You are in a situation where you are trying to keep Naomi calm and telling her that help is on the way.

“The emergency services stayed on the phone to us the whole time so that gave us some sort of reassurances to know where the ambulance was and they were bombarding us with information to keep us kind of calm for the situation that was unfolding in front of me.”

Proud mother Naomi Galvin with baby Ellie, 04-02-2021. Image: Naomi Galvin and John Fearne

He said the professionals eventually arrived right on time, adding, “thankfully, they got there and they are going to do the best job in the world thankfully.”

He said Ellie was a few days late when they travelled to the Coombe; however, doctors assured them everything was fine and the couple decided to head home after getting the all-clear.

“Events started to spiral out of control really quickly then,” he said.

“Naomi felt fine leaving the Coombe and I would say we were a couple of hours away from the place and she just started feeling those very distinct feelings that a baby was on the way.

“It sounds funny that we got caught on our fifth baby that far from the Coombe but Naomi was induced in all the previous ones so she kind of didn’t know what she was looking out for herself which sounds nearly funny.”

He said they managed to make it all the way home before deciding to get back in the car and head back to Dublin.

“Both of us genuinely thought we would get there,” he said.

“We weren’t even ten minutes from home and we said, ‘we have to ring an ambulance, an ambulance is going to have to meet us,’ because there is no way we are getting to the Coombe.”

Ellie will be joining a “big show” at the family’s Kildare home with four other children all aged under eight-years-of-age.

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