Mr. Aidan O'Driscoll:

I thank the Chairman and the Deputies. I will take the questions in the order they were asked. Members will have to forgive me. Deputy Berry has already decided that we are going to do a wonderful report, which is good. I will take that and also thank him for his comments on the level of engagement. I mentioned that many of us believe there is insufficient public debate and engagement in this country on security and defence issues. Through our public consultation, the webinar and so on, we are deliberately trying to provoke debate and discussion, which we hope will have an impact beyond the commission.

The Deputy put a series of questions to me and I do not want to dodge them. I do not like doing that but, frankly, all of them are related to pay. That poses a particular difficulty for me because we do not have a remit on pay rates and so on. On the working time directive and overtime, again, we are keeping an eye on that. I do not rule out that we might have something to say but it will not relate to the issue of pay and overtime rates. The Deputy also invited us to comment on pay awards already made and so on. We will probably decline to do so as it is not really our role. We are not dealing with those kinds of pay issues, which arise in any case.

On the independent pay review body, I cannot answer the Deputy's question. It is a question for the Department of Defence and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform as to when the independent pay review body will be established and what will be its relationship to pay talks. We will not be dealing with that area.

On implementation and the idea of an implementation body, this issue has been raised with us. Unsurprisingly, people have quoted at me the implementation process around the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland, which is overseen by a committee that I helped establish and chaired by the Department of the Taoiseach. That process lies in that place because a whole range of Departments is involved. One of the things many people do not understand is that the Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland was not just dealing with An Garda Síochána. It was dealing with policing in its broadest definition, including social services and so on that deal with people who get themselves involved in criminal activity and all of that. There is a range of Departments involved. I was involved with the Secretary General to the Government in establishing an interdepartmental structure reporting on that to the Department of the Taoiseach for that reason. I am not ruling anything in or out.

With regard to the assistance the committee can give, it is giving it today by raising the issues members have raised. Also, as I said, I welcome the submissions that have been made by members of this committee, the political parties and other public representatives. We are well aware that members hear stuff and we are receiving material on the same issues and it is interesting and helpful to triangulate that somewhat.

When we do our report in December the next step is for the Government to decide what it wants to do with it. The first question is whether the Government accepts, rejects or accepts part of the report. The second question, insofar as the Government accepts it, as I hope it will, is how it proposes to go about implementing it. That is what would normally come out of any such commission report. The Government might ask the committee to review implementation every six months, as members suggest, or the committee may take its own decision in that regard. I am sure it is within its authority to do so. Implementation will not be the commission's responsibility. Our job is to do the report and make our recommendations. We do not, correctly, have any capacity to implement. That rests with our elected representatives. In fact, it rests with Members of the Oireachtas and the Government they choose.

Deputy Lawless raised a number of interesting questions in respect of cybersecurity and maritime, climate and telecommunications security. I agree with him. There is a big range of issues here. We have a number of security experts within the commission and we have had discussions with the national security analysis centre, which is based in the Department of the Taoiseach. We have discussed some of those issues and what is very clear is that the landscape is becoming much more complex than it was even a few years ago. The ground is shifting very fast. Every organisation engaged in this area has to develop the capabilities to deal with these matters, and that is very true of the Defence Forces. This is a major focus for us in our work.

I agree with the Deputy that issues of climate also arise. I referenced that briefly in my opening statement. Climate change impacts on everything but it is also a source of instability. This country will be affected by climate events that we would not otherwise have affected us. More broadly, some of the poorest countries in the world will be deeply affected by climate change and that will have an effect on migration, terrorism and all kinds of issues in those countries. We are an island geographically but we are not an island when it comes to issues of security, which are global issues now.

Deputy Lawless also raised a question, one that I touched on earlier, of looking at the issue of turnover from the other perspective, in other words, the benefits to industry and so on from highly skilled people moving out of the Defence Forces. It is a tug of love. The Defence Forces desperately want these highly skilled people to stay in the Defence Forces and need their skills. They are extremely valuable to Irish industry when they leave. I do not doubt that but we have to find a balance. We cannot have a situation where the Defence Forces are just training people who immediately kick on and leave. The Deputy made the interesting point that people are trained and they then do the job, serve their time in the Defence Forces and move on. There is a natural balance there in people's careers that I can understand.

To turn to the matters raised by the Chairman, the point about having the three services in one service is very interesting. In my opening statement I spoke briefly about jointness. It is a major feature of all modern defence force strategies that I have examined. It means exactly that the traditional focus on land, sea, air is, for the reasons we have just discussed, no longer sufficient. More and more threats and attacks come from hybrid sources which may incorporate cyber, space, land, sea and air and we have to be capable of dealing with the complexity of all of that. Much greater jointness in defence forces is a feature of strategies in other countries and is something we will definitely examine.

I take the Chairman's point also on creating a family friendly environment for the Defence Forces. This is an issue that relates to our desire to have a better gender balance in the Defence Forces but it affects young men also. There are a number of challenges in that regard. Some come from the multiple locations of the Defence Forces and some from the training courses that last for six months that I talked about, while others come from overseas deployments. We cannot throw all of that out the window and say we will not do any of that because we want to be family friendly. We still have to do the core jobs of the Defence Forces but the question is whether we can find a more family friendly way of doing these things. I am aware the Defence Forces are very conscious of this issue and are looking at it. It has been raised with us. As we go around the barracks, we meet staff in all the different ranks but we also meet staff informally in age groups. We meet younger staff and more experienced staff and we gets a somewhat different read from the different groups.

The Chairman is correct about land use and so forth.

The Defence Forces have 20,000 acres of land, mainly at the Curragh, the Glen of Imaal and Kilworth Camp. There are 14 permanently-occupied locations and four rented properties around the country. It is a very dispersed estate, which was largely inherited from the British. Many of these barracks and other buildings are showing their age. I visited the Curragh on Good Friday and met with some colleagues from the commission. It was possible to see even there that the buildings have aged. I also met a lot of sheep. It is an unusual situation, but I take the point. I do not think that the commission will be doing a detailed land-use plan and I do not think we have the capabilities to carry out a survey of all the buildings or anything like that. I hope, however, that we will have something useful to say in that space. I am going to leave it at that, if I may. I hope I have made a good attempt to answer the huge range of questions posed. That reflects the great range of issues raised with us in the public consultation and in our meetings with staff associations and other groups. I propose to stop here, unless the Chair would like me to say some final words.