Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Donegal North East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Richardson for his presentation. My colleague, Deputy Crowe, my party's foreign affairs and defence spokesperson, cannot make it today because there is a meeting of the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade. I was my party's previous defence spokesperson and I am fairly well placed to represent him here today.

The issues during my time as defence spokesperson were around the cutbacks. In the peak, in 2006, the budget was €7.1 million and, in 2014, it was €1.3 million. It was a very serious cutback that they faced. Allied with the issue of the centralisation of training and access facilities, it must be having an impact on recruitment. To a degree, that has been touched on.

The Government cut the numbers of Reserve Defence Force in half, slashed the budget drastically and made it much more difficult for potential young recruits to the Reserve Defence Force from rural areas to access it. When one talks about the White Paper - next year there will be a net gain of 100 and projections forward to 2030 - one of my concerns in the past was that when these decisions were being made RDFRA, as a representative association, was not getting access to the Minister to convey its concerns. The Chairman was a Reserve Defence Force member for 23 years. I would like to believe that every Member of the Oireachtas genuinely respects the role, patriotism and community participation of members of the Reserve Defence Force. What is RDFRA's sense of how we can start to reinstate the Reserve Defence Force's place in Irish society over the next 20 years?