Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 16 June 2004
160 Mr. Durkan asked the Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources the average call-out time in respect of the air or sea rescue services; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [18108/04]
View answerThe Coast Guard of my Department has responsibility for Ireland's marine emergency search and rescue, SAR, services. Air rescue services are provided by four helicopter units located one each at Dublin, Waterford, Shannon and Sligo airports. Sea rescue services are provided by means of agreements with a number of resources. These resources are crewed by volunteers and are located around the coast. They include 54 Coast Guard units, 49 Royal National Lifeboat Institution, RNLI, lifeboats and nine community inshore rescue boats.
For air rescue, the average take-off time following call-out by the Coast Guard between the hours of 07.30 and 21.00 is 12 minutes and, following call-out between the hours of 21.00 and 07.30, is 42 minutes.
For sea rescue the average times to launch following call-out by the Coast Guard are as follows: for Coast Guard units to leave their Station House, 12 minutes; for RNLI lifeboats to launch, 11 minutes; and for community inshore rescue boats to launch, 11 minutes.
The Coast Guard carries out daily incident reviews on all SAR incidents and monitors response times of all declared SAR assets as part of this process. SAR response times form a key performance indicator for the Coast Guard.
