Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance)
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152. To ask the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment the number of times that the ECAS call system has been down in the past five years and when did these happen; and for how long for each occasion. [53986/22]

Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)
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Following a competitive procurement process, BT Communications Ireland Limited (BTCIL) holds the contract to operate the Emergency Call Answering Service (ECAS). The Contract provides a comprehensive set of Key Performance Indicators centred on the availability and quality of the service and BT’s performance against these metrics is closely monitored by my Department, including answering 98% of calls in less than 1.3 seconds.

Over the period of five years BTCIL has consistently achieved the metric of 99.999% of ECAS availability. However, on Tuesday 28th June at 1am the system was unavailable for 1 hour 12 minutes. ECAS technical team immediately engaged, investigated, and identified the issue which was quickly resolved.