Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

My first question is about the Lariam drug. The Health Products Regulatory Authority, HPRA, removed the licence for Lariam in 2016, yet it is still in use in the Defence Forces. Why is that? How many legal cases have been lodged against the Department of Defence and the State with respect to the side effects soldiers were experiencing from the use of Lariam? Will the Minister of State make each of the service personnel concerned fight the case through the courts or does he intend to set up an informal redress scheme to deal with these issues? Is the State going to look after service personnel who are suffering the side effects of Lariam within the Defence Forces family? Will the Minister of State make specialist care available to members of the Defence Forces who have lodged claims with regard to Lariam? Due to the nature of Lariam, will the Minister of State invite the Health Information and Quality Authority, HIQA, to examine the debacle of Lariam? Those are my questions on Lariam.

Will the Minister of State accept that the recruitment policies are failing? I see no embarrassment from him or the Department with respect to the failure in recruitment. It is an outrage that 140 recruits left the Defence Forces during training and did not complete their training. There is a net overall loss of approximately 200, given the number who left and the number who joined.

Yesterday, the Minister of State issued a press release to The Irish Timeswhich compared apples and oranges. It refers to the salary of €24,000 or €25,000 that is paid to a clerical officer in a local authority and indicated that a three star private receives a salary of €28,255. How many members of the public service are told on their way out the gate after spending a day on duty that they are needed for several days to tackle a forest fire in Donegal? Soldiers are not ordinary public servants. They are available to the State 365 days of the year and 24 hours a day. The Minister of State cannot compare apples and oranges and it is disingenuous to do so.

With respect to the Naval Service, the Minister of State talked about the tax break that was given to sailors. Is it not true that fishermen have had the tax break for many years? Is it not true that sailors receive a seagoing allowance that is four times less than that paid to staff in the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine? Why is there a differential in seagoing allowances when public servants on land can all receive the same travel and subsistence allowances?

With respect to the Air Corps, the Minister of State has told us that two pilots returned and have been recommissioned. Is it true that the two pilots who have been recommissioned both hold the rank of lieutenant colonel? Will they be flying? Will the allowances be paid to commandants and lieutenants colonel who are flying, particularly in the area of the air ambulance service?

The Minister of State gave a guarantee in the Seanad and again today that the air ambulance service will be up and running on 1 March 2020. I understand that the air ambulance service needs ten crews and we have two crews. If one or two pilots leave before 1 March, we will not be able to operate an emergency air ambulance service from Athlone. Will the Minister of State explain precisely how he can guarantee that there will be an air ambulance service?

The Minister of State referred to an increased allowance of up to €200,000 that will available to pilots who sign up for eight years. That was a lovely piece to put into The Irish Timesarticle but he did not state that there were three options, namely, a three-year, five-year and eight-year option. He has constantly harped on about the private sector taking away our pilots. Michael O'Leary, the head of Ryanair, had to create special retention measures to keep his pilots. It was utterly disingenuous to refer only to the eight-year option. The Minister of State also referred to a stream of pilots who want to return. Nobody knows who they are. Perhaps he will tell us precisely the number of people who have made inquiries about returning to the Air Corps.

On the allowances that are paid to retain pilots, what about areas such as engineering, ordnance, bomb disposal and cybersecurity where we have two empty seats in the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment. I ask the Minister of State to admit today that he has single-handedly-----