Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail)

I thank the witnesses and the Chair for allowing me to contribute. I am not ordinarily a member of this committee. I was in the last Dáil but Members are accommodated if they want to come in at the end.

I want to take up the last member's questions on 999 calls. In the past two years, the procedure for making emergency calls has changed. Heretofore, if an antisocial incident was happening in a local village, people would phone the local Garda station number and speak to an on-duty garda who would say they will get a car out. In the past few years, gardaí have said that every single incident in the country, from low-level to high-level, all has to be funnelled through the 999 system.

The call centre is competing with emergency calls for the ambulance service, calls about youngsters causing a nuisance at a local shop and a chimney fire on the other side of town. With An Garda Síochána headquarters in the Phoenix Park directing that every single call in the country, from a stone thrown at a car to a murder, goes through the 999 system, are the witnesses experiencing delays in having calls passed through to their operator at the ambulance base?