NINE-YEAR-OLD Carla Murphy had been told to stay in her room.

Her mother was fighting off an intruder upstairs, screaming down the phone to Carla’s father as he rang gardaí. But when the attacker forced his way back into the bedroom, pinning her mother to the bed, Carla could hear the struggle and made a decision no child should ever have to make.

She ran to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and raced back upstairs in an attempt to save her mother.

Moments later, mother and daughter managed to escape the house, and gardaí arrived to arrest the man hiding in a nearby garden.

Two years on, Carla is among 17 people being honoured today with State Bravery Awards.

The awards are part of an annual ceremony recognising extraordinary acts carried out, often instinctively, during moments of sudden danger.

Today’s awards span nearly four decades of rescues, near-tragedies and moments of quick thinking.

The award will be presented to recipients at a ceremony at Leinster House at midday.

The event will be hosted by Joe Duffy, and the medals presented by Ceann Comhairle Verona Murphy.

The 17 recipients hail from counties Mayo, Galway, Clare, Kildare, Offaly, Roscommon, Dublin, Donegal, Waterford, Cork and Cavan.

This year’s ceremony includes the awarding of two certificates, fifteen bronze medals, four silver medals and one gold medal.

A number of today’s recipients who acted to save lives, including Carla, did so as children.

In 1991, 11-year-old Donal Kavanagh woke in the middle of the night to find his grandparents’ home engulfed in smoke.

With no phone in the house, he sprinted to an uncle’s home to raise the alarm before running back into the burning building, rescuing his four-year-old sister and helping a neighbour reach their elderly granduncle trapped behind a bedroom window.

Others stepped forward in moments where instinct might tell you to wait, to call for help, to hope someone else arrives first.

In Waterford in 1986, Pauge Lynch battered his way into a thatched farmhouse already burning fiercely, crawling through smoke to find his elderly neighbour collapsed on the kitchen floor.

He dragged him outside moments before the building was destroyed. Lynch’s award is being accepted posthumously by his daughter.

The list also includes acts at sea and on land, from professionals pushed beyond the expectations of their roles to ordinary people confronted with the unexpected.

Off the Mayo coast in 1988, fisherman Pat Cannon, who could not swim, jumped into rough, freezing water to save a crewmate swept overboard when a bobbin snapped.

Weighed down by heavy gear and repeatedly dragged underwater, he clung to the chain of the trawl door until the boat rolled enough for fellow crew to haul him on board.

His shipmate later said he owed his life entirely to Cannon’s decision to leap into the dark sea after him.

This year’s gold medal, the highest honour, is awarded to Callaghan “Cal” O’Keeffe, the 90-year-old retired teacher from Cork who pushed a woman out of the path of an accelerating car in a shop car park last autumn.

The woman survived with serious injuries. O’Keeffe, struck full force, did not.

His medal is awarded posthumously for giving his life to save another.