Tony Killeen (Clare, Fianna Fail)

The Deputy has made a fair point about the particular challenge we face in this regard. The organisations he mentioned, each of which has a huge voluntary element, have successfully maintained relatively high membership levels. Some of them have found the challenge more difficult than others. The need for co-ordination arises most dramatically in circumstances like those of the last two weeks, which were also experienced in November 2009 and January 2010. The additional opportunities to deploy personnel in these circumstances, during real and contrived exercises, led to clear improvements during the most recent spell of bad weather, by comparison with the previous spells. Each of the organisations mentioned by the Deputy - the Reserve Defence Force, the Civil Defence, the Irish Red Cross and the Order of Malta, etc. - has its own role to play. It is interesting that some of these organisations have strong bases in certain geographical areas. The Reserve Defence Force, which we discussed earlier, has some enormously strong pockets of involvement, membership and recruitment. This success story is not always replicated elsewhere. Some of the other organisations are particularly strong in certain areas. That can be attributed in part to the personnel in those areas being in a position to drive the organisations in question. It is also a function of the attractiveness to young people of the particular organisation. We are speaking specifically about civil defence. One of the great attractions for young people is the fact that FETAC-approved courses are available which might be of assistance in terms of their employment prospects, quite apart from personal development. That is something we try to highlight to the greatest extent possible, but there is an enormous challenge in attracting people into such organisations, to keep them viable at local level.

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