Butler welcomes multi-agency training event at SSE but laments lost opportunity for Northern Ireland

On Tuesday night, emergency services, including the PSNI, NI Ambulance Service (NIAS), NI Fire and Rescue Service (NIFRS), Harbour Police, and Coastguard, participated in a training exercise. The drill, which also involved bomb disposal teams, firearms officers, and counter-terror officers, simulated a terror attack at the SSE Arena.

Commenting on the exercise, UUP MLA Robbie Butler, a former firefighter, stated: "Interagency training is an essential component of public safety. The ability to co-respond to emergency events, regardless of scale, is literally a matter of life or death.

Whilst I welcome the news of a large-scale training for such an event, it will be a lifelong regret for me that we don't see the true potential for coordinated emergency service training. Having worked on the ill-fated Desertcreat tri-service Training College project, we have missed a huge opportunity.

The opening of the new Fire & Rescue training centre at Cookstown is good news for the NIFRS, but a huge loss for increasing wider public safety and co-response."

The opportunities for multi-agency response training are limited, and the event at the SSE has value, but regretfully this could have been a much more regular norm, boosting public safety, exploiting emergency response synergies, and making Northern Ireland's emergency response capacity truly world class."