MAI Books €36 Million for SIRESP With 33 Working-Group Recommendations and an 18-Month Timeline — Internal Administration's Luís Neves Pitches Energy Autonomy and Redundancies After the April 2025 Blackout and the Storm Kristin Centro Outage

The Ministério da Administração Interna on Tuesday committed roughly €36 million to a strengthening programme for SIRESP — the Sistema Integrado de Redes de Emergência e Segurança de Portugal — bundling 33 working-group recommendations into an 18-month implementation timeline. Internal Administration minister Luís Neves walked the package into the ministry on Tuesday, 5 May 2026, alongside the technical coordinator of the interministerial team that drafted the proposal.

The headline framing from MAI is "more energy autonomy and redundancies" across the network. The package is a direct read on two operational shocks — the April 2025 nationwide blackout that briefly took SIRESP nodes off battery cover, and the Storm Kristin episode that hit the Centro region in January 2026 and stretched the network's restoration windows past acceptable thresholds for civil-protection users.

What SIRESP Actually Is — and Why the 2025-2026 Stress Tests Mattered

SIRESP is the dedicated TETRA-based radio network that knits together Portugal's first responders: PSP, GNR, INEM, the Bombeiros corps, the Autoridade Nacional de Emergência e Proteção Civil, the Forças Armadas in domestic-support roles and the Polícia Judiciária. It runs on a base-station grid spread across continental Portugal, supported by repeaters, dispatch centres and a national core that has to stay live during the very events — wildfires, storms, blackouts — that knock down commercial telecom networks.

The April 2025 blackout exposed the cover gap on backup power: SIRESP base stations are designed to run on battery and generator backups during grid failures, but the working group's review found the cover envelope was not consistently dimensioned for multi-hour outages on the 2025 scale. Storm Kristin, four months ago, layered a second lesson on top — wind damage and cable-cut events in the Centro region cascaded through the network's fixed-line backhaul before the redundancy paths could absorb the load.

The 33 Recommendations — Energy, Redundancy and Equipment

MAI did not itemise all 33 recommendations on Tuesday, but Luís Neves outlined the operational shape of the upgrade. The €36 million envelope funds extra battery capacity and generator cover for energy autonomy at base stations, additional retransmitters to thicken the radio mesh, dedicated communications channels — likely tactical channels for civil-protection mobilisations — and replacement and supplementary equipment to lift the network's robustness ceiling. Implementation is pencilled at 18 months end-to-end, with the minister explicitly flagging that summer 2026 — the operational fire-season window — would see "partial" improvements rather than the finished build.

The PRR Bridge — Equipping Every Civil Parish With a SIRESP Phone

The Tuesday investment slots inside a wider government push captured in the recently announced Portugal Transformação, Recuperação e Resiliência plan, which includes equipping all civil parishes with SIRESP phones. The combined effect — a hardened core network plus terminal-level penetration into the country's roughly three thousand freguesias — is the architecture MAI is selling: a national emergency-communications layer that survives the worst event days and reaches the smallest local authorities on the worst days too.

The Political Read — A Network the Country Notices Only When It Fails

SIRESP is one of those pieces of national infrastructure that draws attention only at the post-mortem stage of a crisis. The April 2025 blackout and the Storm Kristin Centro outage are still recent enough that the political cost of underfunding it is high. The €36 million figure is modest in capex terms — it sits well below the €277.5 million IFIC line in the recent PRR reprogramming — but the working group's framing as a 33-point operational upgrade, not a one-off fix, is the more durable signal here. The summer 2026 partial-delivery promise will be the first reality check.