Mr. Seán Hogan:

The fire service works with the National Ambulance Service if it needs assistance. We work with it in responding to road traffic accidents and other incidents in the emergency management sphere. There is an issue in Dublin. Dublin Fire Brigade provides a very good ambulance service in the city, but it is fair to say there is a domain between the two services in which they are competing which is not good for the public. The possibility of using the retained ambulance service to supplement the response to category D and E emergency ambulance calls is under active consideration in the fire service group.

We have a structure whereby we work with staff interests to develop a proposal around what might work, indicating how it would work and what the benefits would be for communities. We are actively looking at that issue which we have flagged to the health sector, but we have not yet engaged with it on any proposal. We are actively working on how the local authority infrastructure might be used to the benefit of communities. If it can, we will be anxious to go there, assuming that we can work up an agreement.

On how we respond, there are some changes proposed. We have always supported the principle that the response should come from the nearest resource rather than being based on municipal boundaries. This principle is restated in Keeping Communities Safe. We engaged in a huge exercise which involved taking account of every address and townland in the country and working out the nearest resource to them, including the nearest 20 fire points in the event of a plane crash. It is what we call our risk-based approach project and we have a huge amount of data. In a large proportion of the country we operate on the basis that the nearest available resource will be dispatched in response to a call. There are a few pockets, however, where, for reasons of history and because of other issues, usually cross-Border issues, this does not apply. An example is a fire brigade having to travel for up to 20 minutes to respond a house fire in an area where there is a fire station located across the county boundary. From our perspective, this is not sustainable and we have asked the local authorities to review the matter. We have provided them with data that should inform their thinking on it. The cost benefit lies in the fire service getting to areas quicker. Our figures show that approximately 4.5% of the population, or 200,000 people, would benefit from this exercise when completed. We expect to increase our response times without changing anything in the service other than what we call predetermined attendance. The principle is to utilise the nearest available resource. I do not think anybody can argue against this principle, but there are delays because, as I am sure members will appreciate, people are possessive of their fire station ground. Fire service personnel are paid on a per call basis. Therefore, if one fire station was to concede some of its ground to a neighbouring station, its personnel would not earn as much as their colleagues in the station next door. These are the issues we are trying to resolve.

On changes to predetermined attendance generally and the concern that particular stations are being run-down, during the exercise mentioned we also looked at setting standards across approximately 50 categories of fire incident and considered the desired response to each of them. As stated by Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív, the response one might have to a fire in Galway might be different from that in County Mayo or Dublin. For example, we took the view that in the case of a house fire, there should be two pumps with a minimum of nine people, but in the case of a skip fire, a single pump would be appropriate. We set out a table of national predetermined attendance figures. What has happened - obviously, there is some concern about this - is that the level of calls to single pump stations has decreased because in the case of a significant fire, the response has not been to send a single pump, as would have been the case in the past, but two. Therefore, the nearest tender with two pumps is dispatched in response to a significant fire. This is, in part, the reason costs have been kept together. The service is not being run down, rather it is being standardised such that the response to a house fire in County Mayo is the same as that in counties Galway and Clare and so on.