asked the Minister for Justice if his attention has been drawn to public concern at delays by the Gardaí in responding to 999 calls in the Dublin area; if he will give the average time taken to respond to such calls; and if he will make a statement on the matter.
Written Answers. - Dublin Emergency Telephone Calls.
35.
The average number of "999" calls received in the Garda Communications Centre for the Dublin Metropolitan Area is running at about 450 per day at present. In addition, incidents are notified to the centre by other phone calls, by gardaí on patrol and by alarm calls, a very large proportion of which, regrettably, are false alarms. In November the total number of calls made to the centre was about 36,000.
The degree of urgency that attaches to the various calls within this total of 36,000 varies enormously. A very high percentage of "999" calls do not require an emergency response while included in the other calls is a number of calls which do require such a response. For this reason it would be totally misleading to give average times for response to "999" calls only. The Garda have found it necessary to classify all calls for assistance into different categories of priority and the Garda response is geared to meet the urgency attaching to each particular type of call. I am assured by the Garda authorities that incidents which come into the "emergency" class are responded to, almost invariably, within minutes.
During the month of November 1989 a response time of under one minute was recorded in 435 cases. Less urgent calls are responded to as speedily as possible — as an indication of overall responses times I am informed that over 70 per cent of the 36,000 calls I have referred to, which I must emphasis include a vast number of non-urgent calls, were responded to in under 30 minutes. I should perhaps make it clear that by "response time" is meant the period between the receipt of a call and the arrival of gardaí at the scene of the incident.