Mr. Martin Cooney:

I might address them in the first instance and invite some of my colleagues to come in. I thank the Deputy for his kind words. We would disagree with the Minister in relation to the survival of the Reserve. The framework that has been put in place as part of the reorganisation completely disregards the fact that we have lives outside of the Defence Forces and that the KPIs and the conditions of service that are put upon us are particularly onerous. They will be very difficult for reservists to meet to be effective. Essentially the value for money review has stated that it will come back and look at this in three years' time. It has been established in such a way that it will be so difficult for us to meet those KPIs that at the end of three years they will turn around and say, "they could not do it." Is it going to be a case that we could not do it because the Government did not help us, it did not put in the support and it did not engage with us in the first place in respect of getting our input before imposing those restrictions on us?

On the issue of the protection of employment, to a large extent we rely on the goodwill of employers. If one's statutory entitlement to annual leave is 20 days and one is expected to do 14 days full-time training, one has essentially lost half of one's annual leave. Now reservists have given up either half of their annual leave or try to take unpaid leave. That puts one at a significant disadvantage in respect of where one is with one's family life and if one is self-employed one cannot take that time off. It is submitted that could be addressed quite easily with legislation or through employment legislation such as the Employment Equality Act, the Unfair Dismissals Act, the Organisation of Working Time Act. These could be amended to include provisions for reservists and provisions preventing discrimination against reservists and protection of reservists. I invite Mr. Robert Gilbey who has looked at the international comparators to give the committee some information on what has happened on the comparators in the value for money review.