Mr. Mark Griffin:

It is difficult to say how many were hoaxes.

When classifying them, the emergency call answering service, ECAS, uses terms like "abandoned calls". These involve people ringing but the calls not being followed up. "Silent calls" are, for example, having one's mobile telephone in a back pocket and hitting the emergency dial by accident. The technology has changed in the past 12 months or so, in that one needs to do a bit more to issue an emergency call.

I do not have the statistics on the number of hoax calls but the trend in the volume of calls in recent years is interesting. In 2009, the precursor to ECAS was operated by eircom and received 3.57 million calls. In 2010, that figure was 3.23 million while in 2011, it was 2.8 million. In 2012, it was approximately the same but decreased to 2.6 million in 2013. There was a significant reduction in 2014 to 2.1 million. The projection for 2015 is approximately 1.8 million. There has been a substantial reduction in the number of calls. Much of this is down to investment in the State's telecomms infrastructure, particularly eircom's copper network. Thanks to upgrading the network, the so-called noisy calls have decreased substantially in the past year or two.

In fairness to ECAS, it had to operate on the basis of the information provided to it. A service was pitched based on an expected level of calls but the number of calls reduced, which had an impact on the call handling fee and the service's overall level of costs, which have declined in the past 12 months in particular, as I told Deputy Perry.