Mr. Eoin Colgan:

I addressed this committee in 2013 and I thank it for granting me that privilege on that occasion. On that occasion we were dealing with the fall-out from the value for money report and we made a conscious decision to take a positive and proactive approach to this report. We were happy that it had come and we were going to get on with it. We were then, and still are, very much committed to making it work. For the public record, I would like to make the point that from the perspective of the Naval Service Reserve, the value for money report was an odious document, which was reverse-engineered to arrive at a predetermined conclusion that the Reserve Defence Force, both the Army Reserve and the Naval Service Reserve, were a bad lot and had to be got rid of. Naval Service Reserve personnel found it particularly galling that the efforts and successes of the force had been quite washed out. No naval officer was on that value for money board and therefore we feel the Department took the chance to airbrush the Naval Service Reserve success out of that report. One might ask why it would do that. The answer is simple: the Naval Service Reserve showed the inconvenient truth that the professional military organisation, the Navy, could use its reserve in an effective manner for the benefit of both the navy and the general public. If one had the time to go back and read that report, one would find that there are far more references to and discussion of the Garda Reserve than the Naval Service Reserve. The net result of this report from our perspective is that we were slashed from an establishment of 400 to 200, despite the fact that we live on an island in the Atlantic, with a coastline of some 7800 km. Some 200 personnel between our four units left us with 50 personnel for each unit and a long list of key performance indicators to be achieved. We feel we have been set up to fail.

In practice the Naval Service Reserve's experience of the single Force concept has been that it is a lot of paperwork and very little in the way of actual support regarding increased training or equipment. The truth is that the single Force concept of trying to merge the Permanent Defence Force and the Reserve Defence Force into a seamless unit is a bit like trying to merge the HSE and Ryanair. It will take a long time and will require many changes of mentality on both sides. I emphasise both sides here, not just the Reserve. In fact, the single Force concept, were it to be properly executed in all its aims and goals, would be far more traumatic to the Permanent Defence Force than ourselves. At the moment the land-based element of the naval service operates like the army. That is to say that it operates within a bubble world within the naval base Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. The navy, like the army, has become very good at wrapping itself up in its own self-imposed regulations and paperwork. Their idea of a single Force concept is that we operate exactly like they do. They have made no compromise in the way they operate to incorporate us. To give a perfect example of this, we were told in early 2013 that just like the naval service, the Naval Service Reserve must use a document called the Manual of Staff Duties when planning and applying for anything.

The manual of staff duties was hand typed in 1980, so we had to operate to a 34-year old hand-typed document, which could not be removed from the barracks. I will give three very brief examples of the other kind of non-compromising procedures and bureaucracy that the Naval Service Reserve, NSR, has to contend with in our battle to try to make the single Force concept successful. The first one is NSR, similar to Army reserve units, are meant to be self-administrating so a prerequisite for the MIF course, which is a course pertaining to logistics and the computer system, is having a European computer driving licence, ECDL. To do an ECDL in the Defence Forces takes a mere four weeks of solid full-time training while, if one were to do it in the civilian world it would take ten hours in various evening courses.

As Mr. Cooney outlined, we had a recruitment campaign and the fitness tests are now the exact same as for the Permanent Defence Force, PDF, which is to be welcomed. However, in our unit, the Naval Service ran the fitness tests in the middle of the day over a Tuesday and Wednesday. The new recruits who wanted to join the Naval Service Reserve were asked to come for a fitness test in Limerick in the middle of the day on a Tuesday and Wednesday. No consideration was given to the fact that such people are part-time, that they have jobs or are students on courses. In fairness, the Naval Service learned from the experience and now they will run the fitness tests at the weekend. However, the suggestion is that the course will be run at the naval base which means people from Limerick and Waterford must travel there. Why could they not come to us?

The third and final example of what goes on relates to eyesight standards. Due to a bureaucratic anomaly the Naval Service Reserve must now have a higher eyesight standard than any other branch of the Defence Forces – Army, Air Corps, Army Reserve and even the Naval Service itself. When we proposed a solution to get around the anomaly, the Naval Service looked at it and thanked us and said it made very interesting reading. Following that, it responded with a half-page e-mail with nine references to our proposal being either “impossible”, “not currently possible” or “very difficult”. One would think we were trying to land a man on the moon.

Those are just three examples of what we encounter. The non-compromising paperwork and bureaucracy is being successfully used to waste time. The changes called for in the value for money report are not being made. The full list of key performance indicators are not being met. No preplanning has taken place with us to discuss what changes have to be made, despite several requests from our side of the fence.

Our fear is that the value for money review, which is set for 2016, has been set to coincide with the election and following the election there will be a new Minister for Defence and that sometime after the Easter commemorations the Department of Defence will drop a review report on the new Minister’s desk and say it gave the reserve a chance but it could not meet it, and that it is time to disband the reserve. As the Taoiseach himself recently said, the Civil Service has the best people in the world to write a 300 page report on why things cannot get done. In order to get where we need to get, what we in the NSR want and need, is a far more positive, flexible and accommodating response from the Naval Service, the Army and the Department of Defence.