Mr. Chris Reynolds:

Another issue raised was Malin stepping in to take over Valentia coverage recently. One was an unplanned outage and the other planned. During the first outage, a telecommunications failure, Malin took over because it was fully manned and Dublin was not. The second outage, the planned one, both Dublin and Malin took half each which is the concept of the operation with the new integrated communications system. That is an example of how the investment of the new technology has been very successful. Only a few years ago, each centre could only control its own area. If there were a power failure in Valentia, there was no way of Malin or Dublin taking over because the boxes in each centre were not capable of taking the extra channels and aerials.

The problems with oil spills and the Deepwater Horizon incident in the US were raised. There were up to 250,000 people involved in that response which went on for months. Crisis management must be viewed as a generic response. Accordingly, when one is responding to either a Costa Concordia or Estonia incident, there is a generic response. The crisis will not come to one; one has to go to the crisis. Therefore, one plans, one prepares, one trains and works with the other agencies that will be involved on the day. We are not talking about having a cohort of people to clean up beaches but a process where we can respond to an incident when it happens. We will not be able to stop every incident happening but at least we can put in strategies to lessen the damage as much as possible.

We work closely with the UK coast guard and have used its aircraft for spotting oil pollution. During the Admiral Kuznetsov oil spill in 2009, we used the UK's Maritime and Coastguard Agency's spotter aircraft for assisting us while all aeronautical search and rescue in Northern Ireland is done by the helicopters based in Dublin and Sligo. We exercise with the Northern Irish coast guard every year in the joint search and rescue, JSAR, games. In the past two years, Sir Alan Massey, head of the UK's Maritime and Coastguard Agency, and Lady Sylvia Hermon, have lent their support to these games.

The Canadian model is based on shipping companies providing many resources. This happens on the other side of the Atlantic where there is much shipping. We do that to a certain extent. If there is a spill, it is the polluter who pays for the cost of the clean up.