Mr. Conor King:

To double up on the governance and risk issue and to also mention the importance of hanging on to suitably qualified and experienced personnel, the Air Corps sought to bring in an expert to talk to it about the difficulties it was undergoing in January 2017. It brought in a gentleman who was a Queen's Counsel, Sir Charles Haddon-Cave. He was the author of the report entitled "The Loss of RAF Nimrod XV230", which was subtitled "A Failure of Leadership, Culture and Priorities". He appealed to Air Corps management and Defence Forces management to treasure and hold on to suitably qualified and experienced personnel, SQEPs, which is a recognised term in business, in order to retain critical capabilities, including specialised management functions associated with military aviation.

According to our Air Corps colleagues, unfortunately, experience takes years to build but can be lost instantly and when experienced personnel are leaving faster than they can be replaced, the burden of safe operations falls on fewer shoulders and this risks overtasking, burnout and overstretch. Society expects military personnel to just get on with the job, to meet any demands and to achieve the mission and we really try to do that. We have an ethos of meeting the demands and of not saying "No", but without sufficient qualified and experienced personnel this leads to a potentially dangerous ethos of can-do, make-do, muddle through as referred to by Sir Charles Haddon-Cave. I will leave it at that with the governance issues but members can see that we have been talking about this for a while. The Air Corps brought this gentleman in in 2017.

A University of Limerick focus group report in 2017 stated "Serious concerns from an organisational level are presented here" and the Defence Forces are "reaching a point of being hollowed out in terms of experienced human capital, that notwithstanding the increased recruitment of cadets it would take 10 plus years to replace the expertise that has been lost". That was in 2017 and we are far worse now. The report went on to state:

Officers have expressed that management's focus on recruitment rather than retention is their primary source of stress. This has led to having higher numbers of inexperienced members while those with sufficient experience and capability are leaving. The workload is increasing and there are fewer members to do the work, so this has led to an inability to meet demand to the standard required. Members are feeling overworked and Officers fear for the safety of their members and the capability of performing to the best possible standard.

That was in 2017. Since the publication of this report, no new policy initiatives have been introduced by management to address the underlying issues identified by the University of Limerick researchers.

To go back to the Gleeson commission, I want to draw an analogy to the position in 1990. The commission report stated at paragraph 3.7.10 that "one factor which must be taken into account is a need to arrive at rates of pay which are sufficient to enable the Defence Forces to recruit and retain personnel of the proper quality". It sounds like common sense and the report went on to state:

To ignore identifiable problems of recruitment would be to run the risk that the Defence Forces would be unable to secure the services of sufficient numbers of suitable personnel. To ignore clear evidence of retention difficulties would lead to out-flows of skilled personnel. In either event, the capacity of the Defence Forces to carry out the tasks assigned to them could be undermined and the problems created would take many years to remedy.

This finding is particularly relevant as the retention of commissioned officers continues to be a major challenge for the Defence Forces. That was in 1990, almost 30 years ago and here we are again. The Senator asked about HR policy. I will ask Mr. Priestley to tackle that one.