Ms Aileen Nolan:

The next questions related to premises, accommodation and funding. As I said earlier on accommodation, it is the responsibility of each local authority to provide suitable accommodation for Civil Defence units. The Department makes a contribution to the local authorities in this regard and is quite happy to do so. We recently received a request from Laois to help with its new build.

That is the way the policy is set out in the White Papers and that is where it falls.

On funding, there were questions on what the total budget is and the 70:30 split or whether the reality is that it is a 60:40 split or even less. The overall funding, as members will have seen in the briefing document, from the Department of Defence for the Civil Defence is €5.4 million. Of that, approximately €3 million will be given out in operational grants to the Civil Defence units. Criteria are used to decide the level of operational grants that are given out, taking into account such things as a basic allowance, an allowance for CDOs, an allowance for ACDOs, the population allowance and an area allowance as a way of calculating how much each county effectively gets in its operational grant. The way it is set up is that we would provide 70% of the funding and local authorities provide 30%. However, in some cases the local authorities provide more than 30% and a higher figure than is necessary. The overall spend for 2023 would probably be in the region of €6.5 million, which means the local authorities will provide over €1 million.