‘Firefighters ill-equipped to handle nuclear fallout’

FIREFIGHTERS are ill-equipped and insufficiently trained to deal with a major nuclear disaster, the National Firefighters Committee said yesterday.

Chair of the committee Brian Murray was commenting on Ireland’s emergency planning after the screening by RTÉ of Fallout, a docudrama about a nuclear disaster at Sellafield.

“There have been no exercises carried out in the middle of a major urban centre in this country to see exactly how the fire services could deal with such an accident,” he stressed.