Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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Question 1451: To ask the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government the number of times the State has been requested by the EU or other EU member states to participate in responses to emergencies with the provision of fire service personnel; the number of times these requests have been met fully; the number of times the State has failed to meet them fully and if so, the reason for same; his intentions to avail of the projects, workshops, training programmes, exercises and expert exchanges, and the funding for same available under the EU civil protection mechanism and community action programme; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [40352/05]

Dick Roche (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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Under the EU civil protection mechanism, when a request for assistance is received at the monitoring and information centre, this request is transmitted to all of the member states and offers of assistance are co-ordinated by the MIC and relayed to the requesting country. The requesting country then decides which offers, or elements of offers, to accept. Ireland participates fully in the EU civil protection mechanism. When a request for assistance is received by my Department from the MIC, it is examined in consultation with other Departments and relevant agencies and a decision is made on whether an offer of assistance can be made. While offers of assistance have been made on occasions, no such offer has in fact been taken up by the requesting country.

There is no record of a specific request for fire services personnel as part of any disaster response. On one occasion, this country offered fire services personnel in response to a request for search and rescue personnel but that offer was not taken up by the requesting country; in practice, countries which regularly experience incidents such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, major forest fires and major floods tend to have significant contingency search and rescue capacity and are in a position to provide substantial resources to assist requesting countries at very short notice.

Ireland is fully committed to participation in EU funded training programmes, exercises, and expert exchanges into the future; because of eligibility restrictions, the scope for participation has been limited up to now but these restrictions have now been lifted. EU training is essentially directed at team leaders and incident assessors and persons trained as team leaders or assessors will be expected to be available to assist in disaster relief if requested. Currently, two Irish nominees are due to commence the basic induction training course, which all potential team leaders and incident assessors must attend, and it is intended that that these persons will complete all of the modules in the coming months. It is intended that other suitable persons will be nominated to attend future training programmes.