What’s going on with drone delivery company Manna’s proposed defibrillator initiative?

On 25 November, local councillors in Blanchardstown got an update from Manna, the drone delivery company, to ask for support.

In the email, among other initiatives, company CEO Bobby Healy asked for backing to progress an emergency defibrillator initiative.

They’ve been working with the National Ambulance Service (NAS), the email says. 

But they needed the HSE, the NAS and Dublin Fire Brigade to wrap up a memorandum of understanding setting out the emergency response pathway to move the project on, it says.

“The successful roll-out of a community defibrillator delivery initiative in Dublin 15 has the potential to materially improve emergency response outcomes for all residents,” says Healy in the letter, “and Manna is proud to be a part of this vitally important community service.”

Healy has mentioned the plan for defibrillator delivery several times – including at the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Transport last July.

But it is still unclear if it will definitely progress.

On 27 November, a spokesperson for the NAS said that while it had had informal discussions around the service as a trial community first responder scheme, it didn’t progress – and those discussions have closed out.

The NAS isn’t the primary pre-hospital emergency care provider for 999 calls in the proposed trial area, they said. “As such, engagements with other state bodies for any proposed trial drone-based first responder scheme would first have to conclude.”

On Monday, a spokesperson for Dublin City Council, which oversees Dublin Fire Brigade, said there had been discussions between Manna and a doctor in relation to trialing defibrillator delivery. 

But the Fire Brigade “did not receive any further details and have no further insight into this project”, they said.

Asked about these responses, a spokesperson for Manna said that it had been engaging a lot with NAS to progress an arrangement for defibrillator deliveries – but the way that emergency response is coordinated means that it expects now to approach Dublin Fire Brigade. 

Manna remains committed to the proposal to deliver defibrillators, and to eventually scaling that, he said.

The spokesperson said that opponents of Manna are working to spread a media narrative that misrepresents what the project is and why it matters. “That kind of distortion only delays solutions that could save lives and support local jobs.”

The proposal to help deliver defibrillators to emergencies in the area – and the call for local councillor support – has refocused debate on public opinion as to what drones should, and shouldn’t, be used for. 

Fianna Fáil Councillor John-Kingsley Onwumereh said the idea of Manna moving into defibrillator delivery has always been on the cards. It seemed to get the support of councillors earlier, he said. 

He would think it would impact wider public attitudes towards drones, he says. “Personally, I think it’s going to be a game-changer in terms of perceptions.”

Labour Councillor John Walsh says he thinks there is a place for drone technology – and one appropriate use is the urgent delivery of medical products. 

“It’s important to say that, like most of us who’ve raised concerns about Manna’s operations in Dublin 15, we are not opposed to drone technology,” he said.

But defibrillators shouldn’t be an afterthought to promote a large-scale drone delivery service, says Walsh. 

Although, ultimately, “I don’t think that’ll make a difference to what people think of it”, he says.

Getting there faster

In July at the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Transport, Healy summed up his opening statement by talking about how the company was moving beyond takeaway. 

“We’ve worked with the Dublin Fire Brigade and the National Ambulance Service to launch a defibrillator drone delivery pilot in Dublin 15 – potentially saving lives where every second counts,” his written statement says. 

“Per the HSE, rolling this out nationally could help save up to 900 lives per year in Ireland,” he said.

Getting defibrillators fast to those experiencing cardiac arrest is central to survival rates, says Joe Galvin, co-lead for the HSE’s National Heart Programme.

The survival rate for somebody who goes into cardiac arrest out of hospital is currently around 8 percent, he says.

At the moment, the average emergency medical services response time in urban areas is 11 minutes and in rural areas is 18 minutes, shows HSE data.  

Last year, defibrillation had been attempted in 12 percent of cases of cardiac arrest before emergency medical services arrival.

Yet, says Galvin, the likelihood that somebody will survive drops by 10 percent each minute from onset of the cardiac arrest to defibrillation or the arrival of an ambulance, he says, showing why speedy response is so important. 

“Anything that can reduce the times to defibrillation, is going to save lives,” he says.

The best cardiac survival rates in the world are in Las Vegas at 66 percent, he says. 

The CCTV surveillance means people are watched closely. If they drop to the floor, somebody can be with them within a few minutes, he says.

If Ireland could get up to 50 percent survival, that could mean saving more than 1,000 lives a year. “There’s nothing that comes near this,” he says.

Blanket CCTV is probably not on, he says. 

So the alternative hope is that if someone has an arrest it is witnessed, and the witness calls for help and a defibrillator can arrive within five minutes, he says.

At the moment, community first responder teams – local volunteers with paramedic training – are alerted when a call comes to the dispatch centre, and they can grab the nearest defibrillator and run there, he says.

Drones could potentially help defibrillators get there faster, he says. “Drones can fly at 60km an hour, so in five minutes they can get 5km.”

“Will it work? I truly don’t know. But I think there is untapped potential,” he says. 

It would cost, he thinks, somewhere between €1 million and €2 million for drones for the roughly 110 stations from which ambulances dispatch across Ireland. “The cost is not insane.”

Galvin said he didn’t really have views on who exactly should be delivering defibrillators by drone – whether it should be a private entity, or the public sector. 

Public-sector pilot

Within Dublin, government agencies are now working to pilot the delivery of defibrillators by drone, as part of the Drone Innovation Partnership. 

The partnership – which does not include Manna – is made up of academics at Maynooth University working with, among others, Dublin City Council and the Irish Aviation Authority.

One thing that the partnership has been trying to get their heads around is how to respond to events that happen once-off, says Tim McCarthy, a professor in the department of computer science at Maynooth University who works on the partnership.

“How do you set up a system that is able to respond to something that's a once off? It could be once every month. It could be once every year,” he says. 

The group are looking at “dock stations” for drones and equipment to tackle that, he says, “which are strategically placed in cities, in towns, along critical infrastructure”.

These dock stations would provide different services, he says. The first port of call for them would be supporting first-line responders – so the fire brigade, the guards, with drones for their operations when they may need to see from above.

If a call came through that someone needed a defibrillator, they could get that down to them also, he says.

For Dublin, he envisages six dock stations, each covering an area of about 5km square. If they’re placed strategically, these could cover all of Dublin, he says. 

However, there is a question of whether this is the best way to get a defibrillator to someone, he says. 

“I'm not saying that this is, this would need to be tested,” he said. “But it's certainly something on the top of our head as we look at how drones can be usefully used across our cities.”

The partnership plans to put a test dock station in the Docklands down by the Poolbeg chimneys next year, he says. “And to start testing there, probably in February, March.”

As well as dock stations, it also needs traffic-management systems in place, he said. Other drones will have to know to get out of the way, he says.

Galvin, co-lead for the HSE’s National Heart Programme, said that he would like to see a pilot programme with drones in rural areas. 

“It’s the rural areas that the survival times really drop off and the response,” he said.

Drones for what

Levels of support for drones have been changing in recent years, surveys suggest. 

The percentage of people who feel positive about drone technology overall sank from 84 percent to 54 percent over the past four years, according to surveys published by Dublin City Council. 

But attitudes depend also on what drones are used for. 

The percentage of people who feel positive about the use of drones for emergency services fell just slightly from 97 percent to 94 percent, the same surveys show.

Onwumereh, the Fianna Fáil councillor, said he has found it hard to gauge levels of support in Dublin 15 for drone deliveries by Manna. 

There are evidently varied concerns among residents around a lack of regulation and the health impact of noise, he says, with different complaints from different quarters. “It’s not a one-dish banquet.”

But he did also take note of the more than 1,000 form emails in support that Manna’s customers sent in recent times, prompted by the company as they visited its website, he says.

On Saturday, a group of local residents from Drone Action D15 protested outside Manna’s delivery hub at Blanchardstown Shopping Centre. 

The gathering was, among other things, to call for Fingal County Council to not approve the company’s application for retention permission for its base in Coolmine. 

Risks to wildlife and the impact on people’s health should have been considered before the company could start to deliver, said Seamus Doyle, one of the group, in a statement ahead of the protest.

Doyle also addressed Manna’s possible role in defibrillator delivery.

“Claims of delivering defibrillators and prescriptions are just that – claims, when we are living the reality of this new unprecedented disturbance in the sky above all our quiet areas and our own homes and gardens,” he said.

“Drone Action D15 would support the use of drones that benefit the many, rather than the few,” said Doyle. 

Uses such as drones for architecture, construction, energy, environment, and public safety, he said. “Skies full of drones delivering coffees and donuts should not be our starting point.”

With the right regulations, Drone Action D15 would support the use of health emergency drones in difficult to reach locations or in emergencies where equipment, blood and medicines are needed urgently, he said. 

“D15 has Connolly Hospital, over a dozen pharmacies and about 30 defibrillators stations in the vicinity,” said Doyle.

Opposition TD Roderic O’Gorman of the Green Party says that his proposed Regulation of Drones Bill 2025 includes, among other things, a list of uses that drones would be permissible for.

Those include for surveying houses, environmental issues, emergency response – and also usages that are in the wider public interest. 

Whether takeaway deliveries would fit in as the wider public interest, because of their potential impact on carbon emissions would need to be decided, he said.

“It would be up to government to set national policy as to what the public interest is,” he says. “That’s important to me because we’ve never had debate in Ireland as to what and how much traffic we want to put in the sky.”