Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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461. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government the amount of funding his Department provided for the fire service's Ctrí project in each of the years 2018, 2019 and to date in 2020, in tabular form. [19931/20]

Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail)
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The provision of a fire service in its functional area, including the establishment and maintenance of a fire brigade, the assessment of fire cover needs and the provision of fire station premises, is a statutory function of individual fire authorities under the Fire Service Acts 1981 and 2003.  My Department supports fire authorities through general policy setting and preparing legislation, providing a central training programme, issuing guidance on operational and other related matters and providing capital funding for priority infrastructural projects.

The CTrí Project, which is supported by my Department and led by the National Directorate for Fire and Emergency Management, has been designed to deliver the next generation fire service communications and mobilisation system. While the current three regional systems have operated successfully since the early 1990's, the technology has now moved forward sufficiently to allow us to establish a single National system with three nodes in the three Regional Communications Centres, and facilitate the development of standardised national technological systems and operational processes. The core elements of the project are:

- the migration from our old analogue radio systems to the new Tetra platform; 

- the development of a new national Fire Service Command and Control software platform which all three regions will use for receipt and despatch; and

- the standardisation, to a common national standard, of all operational process in the three regions, i.e. staffing, training, quality management, control room procedures, etc.

The project represents both a significant financial commitment from the Government and the effective collaboration of all local authorities. The purpose of the project is to improve the quality and resilience of fire services communications across the country, ensuring that we keep our firefighters safe and in turn, allow them to protect the communities they serve. Ctrí retains the ambition of delivering significantly better communication systems, integrating our controls and providing a platform upon which firefighters across the country can continue to deliver safer communities.

My Department provides 100% of the capital funding for the Ctrí project. The amounts provided in each of the years 2018, 2019 and to date in 2020, are set out in the following table.