Mr. Maurice Quinn:

I will start with the point about recruitment and retention. I agree that it is a priority to do whatever it takes to ensure that the Defence Forces can operate effectively. Part of that is morale, part of it is recruitment, and part is retention. It is a priority for me and for the Chief of Staff. Turnover in the military is universally higher than is the norm in the public service. That is part of the nature of the work and the career and, quite often, of the pension arrangements that are in place. That is one of the issues we have always addressed. The departures we have had for the last while are marginally higher. A trend can be seen over the years in the numbers leaving; they are impacted by the strength of the economy in which we are working.

The Deputy mentioned that a new recruitment campaign opened in the last week. There has been significant change. We are going to have two recruitment campaigns per year and will seek to dovetail them with the school-leaving period and things like that. There is a huge amount of work going on, which we will see coming through. I am also hopeful that a smoother flow of recruitment will free up resources to focus on getting more successful recruitment into the Reserve. We still have enough people applying to fill all the posts we have, but the overall numbers applying are falling. We certainly have enough people applying for the cadets and the enlisted personnel. We are working on making the recruitment process much smoother in terms of how we communicate with applicants to keep them with us so they are ready to go when we are ready to take them in. Our statistics on the numbers leaving include 20% who leave during initial training. That is one matter for discussion internally. People join and find early on, for whatever reason, that military life is not for them. That is a retention issue which we are looking at as well.

In terms of trying to get a positive message out about the Defence Forces and to address the morale issue, we know pay is only one of the factors. It is much bigger than that. The recent agreement we reached with the Department of Expenditure and Reform and PDFORRA has had a major impact on those recruited since 2013, with their starting pay at the end of training being around €27,000. With regard to the next public service pay round, that is for voting on by PDFORRA. We are certainly talking to them and were at their conference just this week. We will be meeting with them again next week on the issue of allowances and so forth. That is an ongoing conversation that we have with PDFORRA at the moment and hopefully we will be able to progress there.

On the timing of departures, we watch closely the profile of those who are leaving to see how it can feed back into our HR strategies.

An enormous amount of work has been done to try to increase the number of women joining the Defence Forces. We are still running at a rate of about 6%, but we need to increase the number applying in order to increase the number attested. We had a meeting during the week with a UK Minister. As the United Kingdom seems to be slightly ahead of us, we are going to talk to it about whether there are strategies it has used that we could apply. In fairness to the Defence Forces, the communications unit has done a considerable amount of work to reach out to try to get more women to join the Defence Forces.

With regard to having a work-life balance and the connection to pay, there is always an element of moving members of the Defence Forces to cover brigade areas. That is part and parcel of knowing and having an operational picture across the whole brigades area. There is work being done on the issue of having a work-life balance. A term used in the military is "harmony measures". An example is where a young recruit is located near home. It is a question of internal mobility and that kind of thing.

With regard to other measures to hold on to personnel, we are considering commissioning from the ranks in order that listed personnel can move into the commissioned ranks. The chief has been doing a huge amount of work on the issues of diversity and inclusion to address the level of female participation, etc. There is work under way in workforce planning, the modern term for manpower planning.

On the matter of specialists, including engineers, artificers in the Naval Service and pilots, our next step in part 2 is engagement with the Public Service Pay Commission. We are working with military colleagues to provide evidence of our experiences to determine how we can interact with them. It will very much be an evidence-based approach.

On the working time directive, the Minister made a commitment to PDFORRA at the conference this week. The background work has been completed and we are working closely with the Department of Justice and Equality and the other relevant Departments to have the regulation enacted.