A confidential report into Ireland's ambulance service says that targets for response times can't be met.

According to the Irish Times, the document claims Ireland is too rural to support a service that compares with its English counterpart, and Irish people are less than half as likely to call for an ambulance, compared to English people.

These two factors mean the cost of running the service is much higher here.

The research was completed by UK based firm Lightfoot Solutions, and commissioned by the HSE.

Under HIQA's targets - 80% of potentially life-threatening calls are supposed to be dealt with by a first responder in under eight minutes. Last year only 26.6% of callouts met that target - while in rural areas that dropped to 6.6%.

The report says improvements would only be made by hiring 290 extra staff - at a cost of €15 million per year, and even then, it may not provide enough of an improvement in clinical outcomes for patients who aren't time critical.

The Irish Times' Health Correspondent Paul Cullen says even that would have little impact on the ground. 

Speaking to Newstalk Breakfast this morning, he stated: "This report is commissioned by the HSE. It's a capacity review.

"It says there are limitations to what we can do but there are problems within the ambulance service which need to be faced up to because otherwise we're faced with a recurrence of the kind of the problematic incidents and controversies that we have seen in different parts of the country for the last couple of years."

This morning, David Hall,  director of Lifelife Ambulance service, spoke to Pat Kenny about the report and stated that "we need a much better ambulance service."

"These are life-threatening conditions."

He also discussed some of the problems facing the ambulance service in the country and what could be done to fix the service and response times.