Mr. Seán Hogan:

I am very happy to respond to the invitation to address this committee today on the topic of the providing emergency services, tackling flooding and maintaining facilities in rural areas. I am joined by my colleague, Mr. Conor O’Sullivan, assistant principal officer with the national directorate.

The national directorate was formed within the former Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government in 2009 to deal with two significant areas, fire safety and emergency management. With respect to fire services, the mandate of the national directorate has been to create a model of leadership, support and oversight by central Government of local authority’s provision of consistent, effective, safe and quality fire and emergency services in Ireland. With respect to emergency management, the national directorate has been to the fore in developing arrangements for co-ordination of emergency response across government services and using its expertise to anticipate and manage risk scenarios. The national directorate has been mandated with leading national level response when required, most recently in managing the extensive and extended flooding of last winter, but also episodes of severe weather that have occurred since 2009.

In advance of appearing here today, we provided the committee with a briefing document setting out in what I hope is a comprehensive fashion, the varied work undertaken by the directorate, so I do not propose to go into detail on these issues now. I will focus on three key areas that highlight the work being undertaken to progress the provision of fire and emergency services in Ireland as set out in the reports attached to the briefing note supplied.

Fire services in Ireland are provided by the principal local authorities, with 218 fire stations, some 600 fire engines and 3,400 staff. In undertaking their various statutory roles, they are supported directly by the national directorate as described in the briefing. However, I want to highlight our work on developing national standards against which local fire services are benchmarked and our approach to overseeing the delivery of quality services by the fire authorities. In February 2013, the Keeping Communities Safe policy document was published as national policy. This builds on good practice which has emerged and is the blueprint for the direction of fire safety and fire services, aimed at delivering those consistent, effective and quality fire services in Ireland.

Keeping Communities Safe provided for the establishment of an external validation group, EVG, to assist the directorate in its mandate. As this was an important new process in the relationship between central and local government, the directorate’s management board set down a number of guiding principles to underpin the process. The board’s international expert, Mr. Brian Sweeney, former chief officer of Strathclyde Fire and Rescue, and me, in my role as national director, were mandated by the board to undertake an initial round of external validation visits to fire services, starting early in 2014. The first round of EVG visits, taking in each of the 27 fire services, was completed at the end of quarter one 2015.

The information and knowledge obtained during this round of visits resulted in the publication in April this year of a report entitled Fire Services in Ireland: Local Delivery - National Consistency, and that has been circulated to the committee. The report examines and reports conclusions on four specific areas of inquiry, one of which I want to highlight. This is the area risk categorisation process whereby fire services appraised fire risk in their communities using three years of actual fire data relating to each of their 217 fire station areas or station grounds. Each death from fire is one too many but the report highlights that Ireland is in the league of safest countries in respect of fatalities caused by fire, with a three-year average rate of 6.4 fire deaths per million of population in the years under consideration. However, although everybody will welcome the lowest fatality statistics for 40 years, which occurred in 2013, there is no room for complacency as the Carrickmines fire tragedy of 10 October 2015 brought home to us.

The report finds that local authority fire services are applying and refining internationally recognised risk management approaches to reduce the fire risk and the annual toll of life and property loss caused by fire. Local authorities are matching the assessed fire risk in the individual fire station areas with services based on either the full-time or retained fire service models as appropriate. Local authorities have built a comprehensive support infrastructure for fire services, which they have prioritised and maintained through past difficult years. As requested, individual local authorities have benchmarked their fire services against national standards and national norms published for the first time in Keeping Communities Safe, and a strong degree of consistency, linked to area risk categorisation, now exists in fire service provision. All local authorities are using, or are working towards, national norms as minimum standards.

I will highlight a few aspects of this report for the committee as it is the best way of giving an overview of where fire services are at in Ireland. The report characterises Ireland's fire services as being in transition from a self-contained, individual focus to one where collaboration with each other and partnerships with other branches of local government and other statutory and voluntary sectors are seen as key to achieving the objective of safe communities. Although services are at different stages along the road to transition, and further improvement is required in a number of identified areas, we think the public in Ireland is served well by the evolved arrangements and can retain confidence in the integrity and professionalism of those with responsibility for managing and delivering fire safety and fire services in Ireland.

I will address two further areas. Does the Chairman want me to address fire safety in Traveller accommodation?