Mr. Jim Griffin:

At no stage do any of the full-time staff come out on an incident call with us. They have never done so. They always turn up to an incident a few hours or a day afterwards to run it. They would be classed as incident managers.

For anybody here today who thinks full-time members of staff turn out to incidents, that is a myth. Incidents are turned out to by volunteers only. Since the foundation of the State, since we were the Irish Marine Emergency Service and progressed to the Irish Coast Guard in 2000, we were always the volunteers who turned out to incidents.

On the question the Senator asked about morale, when we stated to the committee in our opening statement that there is more than 100 years of experience here, any other organisation would embrace that 100 years and look for it to make the organisation a more professional organisation and would interact with us.

The Senator talked about us being perhaps just four disgruntled members. From day one, we have gone to management time after time - some of them became very good friends of ours through the 23 years that we worked with them - and said what is being done is so unfair. They have to listen to us. Our concerns are for the volunteers and for those who are coming after us, be it our sons or daughters or people in our community who want to become Coast Guard volunteers, but they would not, or refused to, engage on our safety concerns. It was almost as if they thought we were getting too big for our boots but we were getting very professional. As life and the Coast Guard, as the fourth emergency service, progressed, we were that finding incident after incident was becoming high-tech and we were getting good at it but they did not want to take our concerns on board.

Morale is at an all-time low within the Coast Guard. I would go as far as to say the Order of Malta, Civil Defence and other such organisations are finding it difficult to recruit volunteers. I would say that applies to Scouting Ireland and all such organisations, but the Coast Guard and mountain rescue are the complete opposite because of the intensity of the work we do. We have volunteers constantly wanting to join the Irish Coast Guard, the South Eastern Mountain Rescue Association, SEMRA, and mountain rescue, but not in its current form. We are being told that. As ex-officers constantly in our community, when the Coast Guard is back to what it used to be, we would love to come back on board. Eleven of my members left when I was dismissed. I would say more than 70% of Coast Guard units across the State at present are operating, or are limping along, on a little more than 50% of their volunteers.