ONE of the most uplifting stories in a while was yesterday’s about the safe delivery of baby Warren Joyner in a tractor-drawn ambulance en route to Guernsey’s Princess Elizabeth Hospital.

As the traditional expression has it, mother and baby are doing fine, which is excellent news, and Sark has its latest island-born resident.

There is a somewhat more serious side to this, however: the inherent problems of access to medical care on a small island that is predominantly serviced by boat.

Most will be aware of the poor – to put it mildly – relationship between the Brecqhou-backed Sark Estate Management and the Sark establishment and that appears to extend to the emergency use of helicopters in medical cases.

Whatever the cause of the hostilities and whatever the rights and wrongs, it does seem to speak volumes that an attempt to create a safe, night-time helicopter landing area on the west coast was viewed with enormous hostility by Sark’s planning committee.

Indeed, it is only as a result of some lateral thinking and some temporary lights that SEM has been able to side-step the planners’ attempted blocking tactics and inform Guernsey Air Traffic Control and the Civil Aviation Authority that a safe night-time landing site is available.

Sark might not want commercial helicopters using the island, which is something many people support. Additionally, there is suspicion that an emergency pad is in some sense the thin end of the wedge.

If so, however, it is nothing that could not be resolved around the table by adults putting community welfare before personal prejudice.

As it is, Sark officials wearing anti-helicopter badges merely appear to indicate that their ‘principles’ take priority over the medical needs of fellow islanders and that the island may have gained democracy but lost its common sense.

Fortunately, the decision to deploy an airlift lies independently with the emergency authorities and private enterprise has now provided better landing facilities at no public expense.

What is regrettable, however, is that there is no meeting of minds over something as vital as a speedy evacuation facility.