Around Ireland, diving clubs routinely volunteer to search for bodies. How do they cope with this grim task, asks Rosita Boland

'The only thing I haven't seen in all my years of diving is a mermaid," Frank Sheridan quips. "I'm still looking, though." Sheridan, from Ballina, is a member of the 52-strong Gráinne Uaile Sub Aqua Club, based in Ballina, Co Mayo, and while sightings of mermaids have proved elusive, collectively, they've seen plenty of other things underwater in the club's 26-year history. Sea anemones. Conger eels. Wrecks. Tree roots. Dead sheep. Dead dogs. Shopping trolleys. Bicycles. Human bodies.

Since being established, the club has averaged eight voluntary recovery missions a year, sometimes more. Between 1989 and 2002, it was involved in searches for the bodies of 144 people. In 1997, members lost their team-mate Michael Heffernan, who died while on a rescue dive at a sea-cave at the foot of Horse Island, attempting to save four people who had gone into the cave in a boat and then became trapped by rising water. One of the four people Heffernan was attempting to save, Will Ernest von Below, also died. The remaining three in the cave, including a child of 11, were rescued. Heffernan was the first civilian diver to die during a rescue or search mission in Ireland.

The unhappy fact is that it's usually a search mission the divers are called out on. A rescue mission is when there is either hope or evidence that the person reported to be in the water is still alive. Recovery, as the word suggests, involves recovering a body.

So what are the special qualities divers require if they are to assist in recoveries?

"No imagination," John Garrett from Crossmolina shoots out, and the others laugh blackly. He's only half-joking. "Just because you're an experienced diver doesn't mean that you're an experienced diver for recovery. It's very spooky down there. A lot of the time you're working by feel. But we have a skill that's needed and we didn't want to see people we know - friends, neighbours - with no body to bury. It's a community thing."

Then he shrugs and laughs self-effacingly. "Ah, when people feel they can call on you, it must mean you're not such a gobshite after all!"

"It's definitely not for everyone," Finn O'Mara from Moigownagh says firmly. "Your diving skills have to be second nature so you can concentrate on the search. If you're thinking of your buoyancy or anything else, you're no good."

"You have to switch off totally and become totally objective," says Christy McDonagh of Ballina.

The Gráinne Uaile club, is of course, primarily a recreational and sports diving club, like the 80-plus other sub-aqua clubs there are around the country. Members dive usually to depths of 30, and sometimes 40 metres, often sea-diving around the Belmullet peninsula and down to the shipwreck off Killala Bay, there since 1893. They range in age from 16 to 62 and come from all round the county.

The club has an inflatable and two rigid inflatable boats. Every member has their own kit and the club owns the common equipment, such as the boats, radios, compressor and special underwater torches needed for recoveries, which cost €700 each. These are paid for out of memberships fees, occasional one-off equipment grants from the National Lottery, Leader, or the county council, and once a year, there is a church-gate collection in the club's name. The local community has always been financially supportive.

"Our first recovery was in 1983," Mick Loftus of Crossmolina recalls. "It was a boy of seven at Lough Talt, between Ballina and Tubbercurry. He'd been fishing off a rock, with some friends and his sister, and he fell in. His sister, who was 14, jumped in to save him. She did manage to get to him, and he was hauled up onto the rock by the friends. Then she got into difficulties. And he jumped back in to save her."

Both siblings drowned, watched by their appalled friends. The girl was recovered by the Fire Brigade. The Gráinne Uaile divers recovered the boy's body later the same day from seven metres of water.

"Traditionally, we get a call from the Garda sub-aqua unit. Or we would get a call from some member of the public who knows us, asking us if we can do something," Loftus explains. "However, because of insurance, and because everyone is afraid of litigation these days, the guards are not supposed to call us. But that's the way it has always worked, and still does, for now anyway."

At present, there is ongoing discussion between the Garda Water Unit and the Irish Underwater Council about drafting a letter of understanding about co-ordination of resources between the two bodies. When this is complete, it will formalise the call-out procedures to clubs for rescue and recovery.

About 20 people in the club volunteer for rescue and recovery, and can expect a call at any time of the day or night. Who goes out depends on who is available, but since several of the recovery volunteer divers are self-employed, this makes them more flexible, and employers have also been very understanding in the past. There can be up to 12 people on a recovery, but there are usually at least four: two in the water and two on the bank.

What about visibility at night: do they not have to wait for first light? "The faster you get there, the better the chance you have of finding someone," Garrett says. "That's why we need those special underwater torches. A lot of the time anyway, you're working by feel."

The hardest kind of open waters to search are rivers, because of the currents. The divers search along in methodical grid lines, almost exactly the same as the way searches above ground are done, to ensure every bit of the territory is covered. In a river, when there are up to five divers on a line, it can be extremely difficult to keep a steady course in strong currents.

One body they were searching for in the Moy, that had been seen falling from a bridge in Ballina, was eventually found six-and-a-half weeks later, many miles away, in Ballyshannon, Co Donegal.

"There are more accidental drownings in the summer, but September to March are the sad months," O'Mara says. Suicides account for a very large number of the recoveries that both they and other sub-aqua clubs around the country make. According to Irish Water Safety, between 1996 and 2005, an average of 163 people died by drowning each year in the State. Of that number, 88 a year were suicide, 61 were accidental deaths and 14 undetermined.

The Gráinne Uaile club has been asked to assist in recoveries outside Mayo, and members have helped out in Galway, Sligo, Roscommon and the midlands. When they are called in to help with a search, they keep at it. In 1998, team members spent 49 consecutive days diving Lough Conn, searching for the second of two Enniskillen fishermen who had gone missing when their boat capsized. The second body was found on the 49th day. Their shortest search was six minutes.

The Gráinne Uaile club has a 78 per cent success rate with locating bodies. For all the team members, the worst thing is not coming across a body in the water: it is not finding the body at all. They usually delegate one person in the team to liaise with the family, and update them on what's happening.

"For instance, we need to take breaks when we're diving, and we have to explain that sometimes," Sheridan says. "I tend to get more involved, maybe, with families. I'd go to the funeral Mass, things like that."

No money changes hands for the difficult, but hugely important, services that volunteer divers offer. There are still some things that money cannot buy: the courage, skill, experience, and unselfishness demonstrated by these and other volunteer divers simply doesn't have a price.

"If money is offered by families, it is not accepted," Garrett stresses. "We do it because we can."

The Irish Underwater Council website is www.cft.ie