Gerard P. Craughwell Urges Unified Search and Rescue Oversight

Thank you very much Chair. I want to thank the witnesses who have come in here today. Normally I have a list of things I want to complain about when I meet witnesses coming before this committee, but I have to compliment both the Emergency Planning Office and Civil Defence for the work you do. If I may single out Civil Defence as a former member myself and indeed a ManPAC qualified member, I used to train drill teams for the Civil Defence in Galway back in the day. I don't know how you managed to survive the ravages of the cutbacks that took place, but you're an incredible organisation. The work you do, the breadth of recruiting that you can take, unlike the Reserve Defence, you can take people outside the age brackets if you want. You're not restricted to the same age. Congratulations on 75 years. I think my father before me was also Civil Defence, so that's going back nearly a hundred years. I'm concerned a little because of the number of times you can be called out for a search and rescue operation, which you're extremely good at. Do we need to legislate for labour law to protect your volunteers who are called out and are not able to attend work on a period of time? That's one of the things I'd like to know. The other thing is, if you have a rogue volunteer, somebody who steps outside the agreed procedures, do you have a disciplinary code in place that is robust and will stand up to scrutiny from, say, the Workplace Relations Committee or the LRC? I'd be interested in that. The other thing is, you mentioned boats, you mentioned sonar, you mentioned the wonderful equipment that you have. God be with the days, all we had was the old green goddess back in the days. But I see the fire equipment you have now, I see the ambulances you have, I see the transport you have. Really excellent stuff. I don't want to put you on the spot and you can refuse to answer the question if you want, but Chair, this is something we should look at in the report. Having the search and rescue split between two departments, in my view, is wrong. The civil defence are called out in search and rescue, they have their own boats, they have, as we just heard, a large number of volunteers. But to have the SAR operation, the helicopter search and rescue under the Department of Transport, in a situation where there is a national emergency call out, having two departments involved from my perspective is a bad idea. We should have all of the the search and rescue, all of the volunteering, including the Coast Guard, all under the one department. That would be my view. You don't have to answer that, Ms. Carty, but it's just a personal view of mine and you don't have to agree or disagree with it. And because I'm a bit pushed for time, I have another meeting that I have to go to. I will be back. I might just go on to yourself, Mr. Moreland. Again, the Office of Emergency Planning has shown itself at times of emergency, and they are becoming more frequent in the country, has shown itself to be really, really up there. A couple of things that I am concerned about with respect to emergency planning. One is, it's the talk now, no matter where you go, cables off the coast. So cables off the west coast of Ireland. Interconnectivity between the UK and Ireland is particularly of huge concern at the moment. Take out a gas pipeline and you have not just a national emergency. You have hospitals, you have major infrastructure issues that would be. So I'm wondering, have you got the resources you need to plan for the inevitable emergencies that may take place in the event of a rogue action somewhere in the Irish Sea particularly? Off the south west coast is probably a different issue. The issue of training of local authorities, that really crosses both of your responsibilities. So have you got the resources you need? It's really resources I'm interested. Have you got the resources you need to provide training? I believe local authority members, for example, should be introduced to a training scheme that would have them informed as to what was available and how they can activate the volunteer services if they need them. They may be well up to date or they may not. We're about to take over the presidency of the European Union and that brings with it serious concerns with respect to emergencies that may take place during that period. I wonder, have you now an SOP, a standard operating procedure to deal with emergencies in the event of dignitaries from other states being in the country in the event of a national emergency? My last one is the dignitaries from other states being in the country in the event of a national emergency. My last one then is the interdepartmental cooperation. Somebody in your position, Mr McMoran, in a national emergency, do you have executive authority over all departments or is it a question of requesting assistance from departments which would delay things, I believe? Finally, the very last thing I have to say is when the review is published, Chair, we need to have Mr McMoran back and to discuss how we might implement the findings of the review. I'm sorry for throwing all that on the floor, but I really do want to compliment you for the work you do and I'm delighted to hear Civil Defence are recruiting again. You still manage to have a presence in almost every city or every county in the country and particularly in coastal areas and things like that. So congratulations on a really well done job. Thank you. It's a very limited time to answer those, but if you could, if I can take them in reverse order except to congratulate Senator Crockwell and its family on their engagement with Civil Defence, it's very important. We see that repeatedly where families engage, they bring other family members in and it's critically important to us. Just in reverse order, and I know that Keelan will touch on the communications to local authorities, etc. One of the things that we do right now is that we meet regional groups and we meet newly elected councillors to promote and publicise the services of civil defence so that they understand exactly what is available in the community, particularly for newly elected representatives. So that is something that is ongoing and we have done that in both Sligo and Kerry in the current year. But we would hope to do it a lot more as we move forward. In relation to the search and rescue piece, there are two elements to that for me really. The first is that we do engage very well with Angarda Siakana and they are on our interagency guidance team. So what we have done is developed a map to show our capability across the country, across all of our units to show where we have boats, where we have catering teams, etc. so that the guards are aware of that. But the guards and ourselves are also involved on the National Search and Rescue Forum which is where all of the search parties come together to discuss and agree the way forward on search. So it does happen at two levels. It happens at the ground level with the guards, but it also happens on that National Forum. I agree with you that we do need, in common with other areas, we do need to have joined up thinking on all of our responses and make sure that we are using our resources to best effect. I will let Paul, who is in the technical space, talk to the equipment boats, etc. in a few moments. I will just talk a bit about the labour law, etc. and the rogue volunteer. So we do have a code of practice, a statutory instrument that was published alongside the Civil Defence Act 2023. That does set out the expectations of the volunteer, but also what the volunteer should do in the event that there is some kind of behaviour that is worrying in the unit. It also sets out responsibilities for the Civil Defence officers and right up to local authority level. Now what we are trying to do in that space, as part of the volunteer induction and charter, is to strengthen that and put absolute protocols in place around that. In relation to the labour law, we do have in place an informal piece that manages the hours that volunteers do on the ground, so that they are not overworked or over-tasked on the duty. So informally that does happen on the ground at the moment. I will just pass over to Paul, if that is okay, to talk a little bit about the equipment and the resources that we have available. Thank you, Senator. Yes, so with regard to boats, I will start off there. Through dormant accounts funding, both this year and last year, we invested heavily in upgrading the fleet of boats across the country. We are developing a new standard operating guidelines. We are more or less on the final draft of that, and we will be presenting that in the department in the coming months. In tandem with that, we have been already rolling out new training as part of that standard operating guidelines, and that has been very successful across a lot of units. There is training going on even today in Roscommon, I think, as part of it. So that is on the boats. On the other search equipment, sonar and drones, we have invested heavily in that in the last couple of years. Just last week, we deployed four new drones across Roscommon, Carlo Tipperary and Cavan, actually. So they will all be trained now this weekend on new drone pilots, and those drones will give them extra capability where they can fly in more inclement weather, particularly in the recovery phase of severe weather events, but where they are more often used is in the search and rescue space because they have that longer endurance, extra capability of thermal capability where you can be used as a force multiplier for boots on the ground who are actually carrying out the searches. So that is one of the things. Again, with sonar, we have expanded our capability in that, providing search and waterways, mainly inland waterways, some coastal, and with that we share those capabilities and the outputs from those with the, in most cases, the lead agency for missing persons would be on Garda Siakana, but we can also share those capabilities with other agencies, for example, for wildfire response, where they might want to, the Air Corps might want to know water depths of a particular water body before they do Bambi bucket scoops, that kind of thing, we can provide that in advance. You did talk for too long, Senator Cromwell. But I would just like to get just a quick response maybe from yourself, Mr McMorland, and before I go on to the next witness. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Senator. Just in respect to the protection of subsea cables, so we run the national risk assessment process out of our office, and in 2023 we identified damage to subsea cables as one of the 22 key risks to Ireland, sorry, to damage to undersea infrastructure as one of the 22 key risks. What we actually did, we did an analysis on it, and we saw that the damage to the gas interconnector was an intentional disruption to the gas interconnector was the reasonable worst case scenario for damage to undersea infrastructure. And we operate a lead government department model, so once we identify a risk, a key risk, then that risk is given a risk owner, and the Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment is the risk owner for that particular risk. With respect to the coordination of national level responses, emergency planning is two sides of a coin. You've got the planning and preparedness element to it, and then you hit the response phase. Planning and preparedness, it's the, Tanishta, as Chair of the Government Task Force, manages that element with us supporting him. And then when we go into response phase, it's the lead government department that has responsibility for the crisis. And our responsibility is to convene the National Emergency Coordination Group on their behalf. The National Emergency Coordination Group is the same group as the GTF, so it's the same group of senior officials there. And our KPI under Strategic Emergency Management Policy is to convene that group within 60 minutes. Okay.