Dr. Ciara McMahon:

An emergency plan should always be under review and it is always being updated. Each organisation that has a role has its own plan. That includes the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland.

We keep it continually under review but we would have had a particular review after the Fukushima accident because we would have used elements of the plan in responding to that accident, even though the amount of radioactivity that reached Ireland was minuscule. Obviously, many international events were occurring. We had to work with colleagues in the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, environmental health officers and so on in assessing any imports from Japan. We also had to give advice to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for any Irish people living in Japan. Certain elements of the plan were used in real life during the Fukushima accident and that was an opportunity for us to review it.

There are many organisations involved. The Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government is the lead Department for the plan but it also involves our organisation, Met Éireann, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, the Department of Defence, the Defence Forces, the Garda and many other organisations. We work closely with them and all the assessments we have done, both on the potential nuclear power plants and on the existing nuclear power plants around the world, have shown clearly that because of our distance from any nuclear power plants, the most important thing we have to protect to reduce people's radiation doses is the food chain. We put a great deal of our efforts, therefore, into ensuring Ireland has plans in place to deal with the potential contamination of the food chain to ensure we can prevent that contamination by taking certain early steps at farm level, and we work very closely with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine to ensure those plans exist.

This morning we had a training session for experts from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. An expert group has been set up under the national emergency plan with experts from the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland, RPII, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and the Food Safety Authority of Ireland. We would have regular training sessions. We are co-developing a handbook and updating that constantly with the best information available internationally but also on particular information of importance to Ireland in terms of where milk is produced, the procedures for getting information out and the best way of informing farmers or other groups such as food producers. We would work with the people who work with them all the time such as the Food Safety Authority of Ireland and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine.

In terms of the notification, Ireland is a signatory to two international notification systems, one through the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency and one from the European Commission. In both cases the message comes to ourselves in the RPII in parallel with coming to the Garda communications centre because it operates on a 24 hours a day, seven days a week basis. We have somebody on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week and if a message comes in, we will be notified very quickly. A chain is set up in terms of notification of other organisations, and the Garda communications centre, with the help of the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, maintains a list of the key contact people in all the relevant Departments. Very quickly, therefore, the message can be got out and then through the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government the message will be sent out to the local authorities in terms of keeping them up to date. Those structures are in place not just for this plan but also for all the other emergency plans, including the major emergency plans in which the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government has a very strong role.