Mr. Neil Richardson:

The Deputy's question on the target membership is a broad one because our membership demographic is as wide as the breadth of categories of people in the State. We recruit students just out of secondary school all the way up to highly qualified specialists. As such, it is hard to say specifically who we are recruiting. Our target for the next recruitment intake will lean, however, towards specialists. To give an example, the IT experts to whom I referred in my opening statement are people who work for international or multinational technology corporations like Intel, Google, Microsoft and Facebook. That we can get these individuals to work within the Reserve Defence Force for the Defence Forces on a predominantly free basis is a miracle. They are willing to give their time for free to be a part of the military family and engage in that way. While we will recruit anyone who is interested and while there are specialist and non-specialist roles across the Reserve Defence Force, the next recruitment competition will probably lean toward getting specialists into key areas to help out.

I take the Deputy's point on the time commitment. Some people will be able to give more or less time. The proposed amendment to the Defence (Amendment) Act 2006 would allow a Reserve team to go to the UK or the Continent to help with training activities for a week or two. Reservists commit regularly to training periods of that length within the State. As such, this dovetails with the leave people take from work. For short deployments, employment protection legislation would not be required to apply as it would be simple enough for people to meet the time commitment involved from current set-ups.

We can be used meaningfully for short durations; that would sit very well with the Reserve Defence Forces set-up.