Mr. Keith Leonard:

I will quickly comment on the Civil Defence. The Civil Defence has been a huge enabler in many of the responses we have been involved in, particularly the transport in snow and ice conditions, but also the humanitarian piece. We are strongly supportive of the Civil Defence.

In relation to the Army, one of the key benefits of activating a national emergency co-ordination group is that there are not a huge number of resources always available in the Defence Forces but we are able to prioritise those to the places most in need. From a very early stage, the Defence Forces were fully committed to supporting the response in any way that they could. One of the first actions they took was to support the ESB Networks, with the Air Corps flying over where the damage was. That was a huge piece in getting us up and running quickly. The other piece that they did for us, which was a huge piece, was heavy transport of generators. I recall Mr. Rock was on the phone. There must have been 40 phone calls one morning about getting generators out. They did a huge amount of work in that space. We work very closely and we mediate the requests through the local authorities. We prioritise them at the national emergency co-ordination group, agree them and then the Defence Forces are deployed on that basis.