“It was horrible to see first thing this morning but my first thought was with Caitlin,” he said.

“I sent her a text straight away and she said she’d knocked off just an hour before it all happened. If she hadn’t she would have been a first responder.”

She has served as a paramedic in London for the past year and many of her colleagues were confronted by the scenes of carnage at Westminster. 

Mr Fitzgibbon said that during her career his daughter had dealt with all kinds of trauma and delivered babies in the streets, including outside Maitland Hospital.