Garda Commissioner Noel Conroy has urged the private security sector to offer higher quality intruder alarms to their commercial and residential customers, saying gardaí will no longer go to premises with a history of false alarms.
Mr Conroy said false alarms wasted valuable Garda time and took resources from areas of genuine need.
"We cannot continue to respond to calls like we did in the past. No other police force in the EU responds to alarms at the rate we do," Mr Conroy said.
However, alarm calls triggered by panic buttons would always be responded to, he said.
He was speaking at the opening session in Dublin of ISEC, Ireland's national private sector security exhibition.
He said if suppliers offered their clients alarm systems with a "secondary" alarm component, the vast majority of false alarms could be avoided. He said such secondary systems are activated when an intruder enters a building, unlike those alarms that can be triggered by the breeze.
"We will have to base our responses in the future on whether there is the corroborative evidence available that there genuinely is an intruder," Mr Conroy said of the secondary alarm systems.
Much progress had been made in recent years in reducing the frequency of false alarms through better technology.
This had saved Garda time and he was hopeful recent trends would continue.