Mr. Fergal Conroy:

It will make a big difference to the volunteers themselves. Instead of sending out direct emails to them for every event or activity that is going on, they will have a shared calendar whereby they will see within a county what is going on, for example, in Laois, Offaly, Kildare, Cork, Kerry or wherever it is. They will also be able to reply back to that, which will come back to the civil defence officer, CDO, or the assistant civil defence officer, ACDO, within the counties. From an organisational and management point of view, we will have a lot more access and an awful lot more built-in material behind for statistics, such as for how many people turned out to each event or how many nights of training they turned up at. Up to now, on the other hand, there was an awful lot of work on the CDO up until the past couple of years when the ACDOs were appointed. Now, the ACDOs are there. It will make the work more balanced and it will make a better work-life balance for everybody across the board. It will also make the volunteers able to see what they are doing, what their records are like and when they will come out on training. There is a certain responsibility on the volunteer as well to keep up to date with the material and the information.