Emergency calls up 11pc last year

Calls to Ireland’s 999/112 emergency operators increased by over 11pc last year to almost 2.1m — but less than half reached the emergency services and 53pc of calls to the Emergency Call Answering Service (Ecas) were not required to be patched through to one of the four front-line emergency services because they were vetted and filtered by operators.

Ecas is operated by BT Ireland, which took over the service from Eircom (now Eir) in 2010. Operators at two Ecas centres transfer relevant calls to Ireland’s front-line emergency services. Ecas aims to answer each call within 0.6 seconds.