Mr. Conor King:

This also was asked by Senator O'Reilly. I will pick up on his questions after this.

I had the privilege of working in the Defence Forces training centre, DFTC, for a number of years of my career. Nowhere else in the Defence Forces is the lack of civilian tradespeople so obvious than in the DFTC in respect of dilapidated structures and lack of maintenance. When you dig a bit deeper and look at the establishment of civilian tradespeople - I could be wrong but I can check - the number should be approximately 300 but about 40 are employed. If we drill down into that, we are supposed to have eight electricians, for example, among civilian tradespeople but we have one. We are supposed to have eight plumbers but we have none. That is the simple fact. This happened because as these ladies and gentlemen were getting on in years and retiring, people were not being recruited to replace them. It is just a simple fact. As a result of the White Paper, a project was initiated, and closed, to bring in civilian tradespeople. I am not sure how many have been brought in since. The impact of not replacing civilian tradespeople was very evident in many of our locations throughout the country as time went on.

Senator O'Reilly had another question on pay, allowances and conditions and on whether the issue is pay or lifestyle. It is pay at a certain point. The issue is pay when the level of responsibility and the amount of time and hours people are working are considered. We talk about push and pull factors. The pull factors are talked about in relation to the economy and that has often been thrown about. However, we have heard about the push factors from our members and retiring members. Some of them are reasonably well paid but are not well paid for the actual conditions of service they experience. That is the problem. There has to be a sweet spot between pay and conditions in order to retain people.

Where will members of the Defence Forces go? They are going more and more, would you believe, to the public sector. I recently counted approximately ten captains who have taken up assistant principal roles in the Civil Service over the past year. It is not just because of big wages in Google, Aldi, Ernst &Young, etc. The Exchequer is paying for these people but they are in different roles with better security of tenure and, crucially, longer retirement ages because all post-2013 employees in the public sector can now serve until the age of 70. Members of the Defence Forces are still kicked out before reaching the age of 60. Those are the differences.

I was asked about the working time directive and why it has not yet been implemented. It might be said it is not as simple as clicking your fingers but, perhaps, it is. It is just a matter of taking the exemptions for the Garda Síochána and the Defence Forces out of the Organisation of Working Time Act. However, there is then a question to be answered because in order to meet the limits, not the targets, of working time in the directive, either more people or fewer roles will be needed. It is as simple as that. The fact that, 11 years ago, the European Court of Justice found that Ireland was in breach of the working time directive and it has still not been implemented in that time is a damning indictment of the value placed on our members and on all Defence Forces personnel.