Busy Halloween night without major incidents

Emergency services and gardaí have reported a busy Halloween night but without major incident.

Emergency services and gardaí have reported a busy Halloween night but without major incident.

Dublin Fire Brigade said they had received three times the number of calls to bonfires compared to last year, but calls to fireworks-related injuries were significantly lower.

David Bell, Third Officer, Operations with the Dublin Fire Brigade said only three calls relating to fireworks burn injuries were received and one of them was a bogus call.

"We are definitely down on the number of injuries received as a results of fireworks," he said this morning.

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However he said calls to bonfires were up.

"Last Halloween the number of calls Dublin Fire Brigade would have had to answer between 1 o'clock in the day and approximately 1 o'clock in the morning would have been about 136 fire calls.

"This year we had 388, so it was a significantly increase." He said some of these would have been in open ground and let burn out on their own, while others were put out.

A Garda spokeswoman said they had received a lot of calls but that it had been no busier than a weekend night.

The Northern Ireland Fire & Rescue Service also reported a sharp rise in the number of incidents it attended which were up 56 per cent from last year.

The Fire & Rescue Service attended 540 incidents this Halloween, which was up on 345 incidents for the same period in 2005.

The busiest hour was between 8pm - 9pm last night when fire crews attended 70 separate incidents across Northern Ireland.