Mr. Seán Hogan:

Wild land fires are not strictly issues for rural and mountain areas. We would have very grave concerns about urban areas where if fire breaks out, there will be smoke and people with health issues will be badly affected. We did quite a bit of work with our colleagues in public health on that issue at the time anticipating that this might happen. Members may recall an extreme forest fire in the Cloosh Valley in Galway that affected Galway city. The smoke was coming in the right direction, came into Galway city and affected people there so it is not a remote and dramatic thing at night time out in the country. This can affect a population. These issues must be managed.

This is a general approach to this. This is not just the fire service working on its own. For wild land firefighting, the people involved have been led by the fire service, NPWS, the OPW, our colleagues in the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, who issue the warnings, and our colleagues in the Department of Defence so there is a multi-agency approach to this. That is the beauty of co-ordination. One brings people together. One can then say, "This is what we are going to do about this", and everybody knows that. This co-ordination approach may not always hit national level but it is embedded in many emergency response areas. It shows the times and it works well. The biggest and best example was after Storm Ophelia when more than 300,000 customers were left without electricity supply.

Water supplies also went down. ESB Networks and Irish Water working together with the Defence Forces and local authorities to respond to that is probably as good an example as any of co-ordinated response, prioritising and getting things done. They were able to adhere to their expected response times. We never heard of these response times ten years ago, whereas now they have become the norm. When the electricity supply network is down, the expected response time for a given area will be two days, three days or 12 hours, depending on circumstances. This is the kind of progress being made in this area.