Mr. Derek Priestley:

Going back to March 2020, very high-level contacts were made between military management and the HSE. In fairness to our Defence Forces and the Department of Defence, there was a huge willingness to get involved straight away. Initially, that was around what were termed the four Ts, that is, testing, tracing, transport and tentage. Later, vaccinations were added to that. When you separate out the figures a year and a bit later, you see that this effort has involved 82,582 man-days to date. There have been 15,653 transport movements, 36 flights by the Air Corps moving vaccines around the place and 1,722 man-days in the RDS. The willingness of the Defence Forces to get involved in the national resilience and deployment effort was very much there and their contribution was an agile one. We continue to be involved in mandatory quarantining, vaccinations and testing.

The contact tracing system, something that had never existed in the history of the State, was generated over a number of weeks and it was led, managed and run by the Defence Forces. We used cadets as the operators to such an extent that these people were so well switched on, trained and managed that they became the trainers of the trainers and led the charge for the HSE to bring on contact tracing. While we all know there were issues, it is a remarkable achievement that our cadets were so agile and flexible as to be able to lead all of that.

What we have managed to do over the past year and a half has been phenomenal and we must not forget that it all came from existing resources. Not one extra person was recruited on the back of it and no extra money came into the Defence Forces to do it. We continued to do all our other outputs, both overseas and nationally, including security patrolling of the sea and air. It has been a phenomenal effort and we really want to stress that this is what we all joined up to do and what people want to do. We are concerned, however, about where we will be left when we pull back from supporting the HSE and the national resilience effort. Our Chief of Staff, when he briefed us before St. Patrick's Day last year, said that we need to still be standing when all of this is over. I have concerns from the HR and personnel side of things as to what we will be left looking like when this effort is over.