Council doesn’t have ‘budget capacity’ of €757,000 to reopen fire station
Castlerea Fire Station, which has been closed since 2017. Pic. Liam Reynolds
Roscommon County Council doesn’t have the “budget capacity” of €757,000 needed to re-open Castlerea Fire Station, the May meeting of the council heard.
The council’s director of finance Sean Mullarkey revealed the re-opening figure during a discussion on fresh calls to reopen the fire station, which closed in 2017.
Mr Mullarkey pointed to recruitment and training, costs of attending incidents and annual running costs as considerations when calculating the budget needed to reopen Castlerea Fire Station.
The meeting was informed that the total costs required to reopen it would come to €757,000 with an annual running cost of approximately €350,000.
He said that Roscommon County Council didn’t have the “budget capacity” to re-open a station “so I don’t know where the money would be found”.
In terms of fire service cover, the meeting heard that there were five fire stations in the county, Boyle, Ballaghaderreen, Elphin, Strokestown and Roscommon and fourteen in surrounding areas - Ferbane, Ballinasloe, Mountbellew, Ballyhaunis, Claremorris, Charlestown, Tubbercurry, Ballymote, Drumshanbo, Carrick-on-Shannon, Mohill, Longford, Lanesboro and Athlone.
Mr Mullarkey explained that each of these stations was in the the process of increasing their complement to twelve firefighters, which would amount to a total of 228 firefighters servicing County Roscommon.
In terms of callouts, the director of finance pointed out that in the two years between 2020 and 2022, there were 626 fire service call outs in the county, 54 of them related to the Castlerea fire ground.
In 2023, that figure dropped to 17 callouts in Castlerea - nine rural and eight urban.
He added that the response time to a recent fire in Castlerea was 13 minutes 49 seconds.
Responding to a call from Cllr Paschal Fitzmaurice to set up a working group to recommend to Government to fund a fire service, Mr Mullarkey said the executive did not have the ability to do that because this was an area for the SPCS.
“For a working group to make a recommendation on those types of figures would be very difficult. In summary we have no problem anyone lobbying the Government, but they are the facts in terms of the costs, the number of call-outs, the number of fire services around the county and the proximity of them,” he said.
