Willie O'Dea (Limerick East, Fianna Fail)

I am not familiar with that specific incident, though I can make inquiries. One thing I have emphasised strongly for the emergency task force, which it does now on a regular basis as people such as Mr. Tom Clonan acknowledge, is that it conducts exercises. There have been quite a number involving crashes and pile-ups, train and car crashes etc. We saw the emergency services in action in the tragic situation in County Meath where a number of school children were killed and injured. Everybody agrees, including the parents of those children to whom I spoke on the day I went there, that the emergency services worked very well in practice. However, the job of the emergency task force is to continue to refine and develop its response to an emergency. To do that properly, as Mr. Clonan has pointed out and I agree, we have to conduct regular exercises. We have conducted exercises on nuclear fall-out and various other matters. One of the main types of exercise we conduct, however, is related to the fall-out from a crash, whether a road accident, train crash or whatever. We are continually exercising in that regard. I do not know what happened, as regards the incident to which Deputy Timmins referred.

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