When everyone else is running away from danger, firefighters run towards it. So let’s pay them better

When everyone else is running away from danger, firefighters run towards it. That’s their job.

And the fact that 343 of them lost their lives in New York on 9/11 tells you everything you need to know about that kind of commitment, courage and selflessness.

Despite cutbacks during the austerity years, most of the Greek firefighting service is staffed by full-time employees or long-term contract workers. Only 15pc are volunteer firefighters who must undergo 120 hours of training and be available on up to four occasions every month.

In this country, meanwhile, over 65pc of our firefighters are part-timers – known as ‘retained’ firefighters – with only cities and some larger towns staffed by full-timers.

That we rely heavily on these ‘retained’ firefighters therefore speaks for itself. That they are due gratitude and respect is obvious.

Sadly, what appears to be less obvious – to the powers-that-be – is that acknowledgement of their worth should also mean they are properly paid for the job they do.

So they have found themselves this summer – these men and women prepared to risk their lives in the service of others – having to threaten industrial action in order to be treated, and paid, in a manner that acknowledges their contribution.

A contribution, it’s worth pointing out, from which most of us would run a mile.

And yet they give it willingly, all those firefighters across the world – from Grenfell Tower in London to the deathscapes of Mati in Greece, from the streets of a traumatised New York to a tragic halting site in Dublin’s Carrickmines.

Global firefighters, running towards fire, challenging its power, facing it down.

Firefighting is not ordinary work. Many jobs are demanding – but few require such levels of physical courage, and even fewer jobs see their employees go home at the end of the working day, having single-handedly saved someone’s life.

Not for them, then, the job of mending car engines or teaching kids. Nor are they happy to sit at a desk, stand behind a shop counter or flog houses for a living.

Rather, they choose to stand in the baking heat of a Greek hillside, right in the path of the flames, or they cut mangled humans out of cars, or rush into buildings where the roof is about to come down.

‘Tharsein Sozein’ is the motto of the fire service of Greece; it’s the rallying cry that all those fighting this week to save lives and livelihoods across the Hellenic territories live by.

It means ‘Be Brave and Save’. A code that applies to all firefighters across the world. It’s very difficult to think of a better maxim for anyone’s working life.

Isn’t it time, then, we treated our own firefighters with the respect they deserve?