Thirty years of answering the lifeboat call: Bangor's John Bell is Northern Ireland's '999 Hero'

John Bell is a solicitor by day. Since 1995, whenever the pager goes, he has also been a lifeboat volunteer — heading out from Bangor with the RNLI, the charity whose crews launch into the worst weather to bring strangers home. Across more than 30 years he has rescued people in trouble on the water, comforted the injured and talked hope back into people who had run out of it. At the Spirit of Northern Ireland Awards 2026, held at the Culloden Hotel, Bell was named the country's '999 Hero' — honoured, in the citation's words, for willingly risking his own safety to rescue others. Three decades, one pager, always answered.

Mechanism: individual leader