Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour)
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335. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government the number of persons employed in the fire service in each of the years 2015 to 2020 and to date in 2021. [37435/21]

Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail)
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Under section 159 of the Local Government Act 2001, each Chief Executive is responsible for the staffing and organisational arrangements necessary for carrying out the functions of the local authority for which he or she is responsible.

My Department oversees workforce planning for the local government sector, including the monitoring of local government sector employment levels. To this end, my Department gathers aggregate quarterly data on staff numbers in each local authority on a whole time equivalent basis.

However, granular data, in terms of the detailed breakdown of the local authorities of the number of persons employed in the fire service is not collected and consequently is not available in my Department. The relevant information would be available from individual local authorities.

While my Department does not routinely collect this data, as part of a monitoring exercise currently in progress a breakdown, based on data supplied by local authorities, of the number of staff in the fire service in each fire authority as at June 2021 is set out in the following table.