Mr. Fergal Conroy:

On recruitment, it is normally up to the local unit to decide what to do. I have just taken over in County Offaly in recent months, since last June or July, and the unit was not quite active. Numbers were on paper but not actually on the ground. In the last period, and I am only getting my feet under the table and getting sorted out, we received 12 application forms and retained eight of them, of which five were male and three female applicants. Since then, and when a county becomes more active on social media and so on and so forth, I have seen increasing queries from people. The process involves an application form being filled out and we have a number of minimum training standards everyone has to abide by. Applicants must have Garda vetting, cardiac first response, CFR, certification, manual handling qualifications, and induction within the organisation itself. Those are the four main criteria we follow.

It then depends on the different services that are active in a county. Some counties, for example, Wicklow, may be more into the fire end of stuff, while Laois-Offaly might be more hands-on and on the ground or whatever. It depends on local arrangements. However, it is regionalised in that we have regional training for different services, such as Laois-Offaly or Westmeath, within our region. For example, my region is Laois-Offaly and Westmeath-Longford.