Mr. Conor King:

Deputy Clarke asked about the Accounting Officer and the Chief of Staff. That is probably a policy matter but, certainly, our members tell us that they feel the Defence Forces would benefit from a greater say in the allocation and deployability of resources. Where certain delays have occurred with deployment, this is seen as being an extra layer of bureaucracy that perhaps should not exist.

The Deputy asked how often we have met with the Minister for Defence, who has been in office since July 2020. We met with him on three occasions last year but have not had a meeting in 2021. The last meeting with him was not very satisfactory from our perspective simply because we were talking about the pay negotiation. There were no answers given and there has been no follow-up since on how we were treated and how that can be avoided in the future.

At that meeting, we tried to discuss the high-level implementation plan which was supposed to deliver pay talks. We were asked to take it offline. Seven months later, there has been no follow up. That is very disappointing for our members.

I will not play blame games for the failure. A number of entities are involved in the lack of delivery of the high-level plan but it must be remembered that it still exists and it could be delivered but there must be oversight. That is where the joint committee might come in.

Finally, on planned obsolesce, I could not believe that. If we believed that, the three of us would not be here. We could not believe that. It is probably outside of my range to talk about primary radar but plenty has been said about it. The threats are in the public domain but from a representative point of view, it is probably in the operational stakes.

What improvements would we like to see in the conciliation and arbitration scheme? We spoke about the tendency to go to arbitration straight away. That in itself encapsulates the dysfunctional nature of engagement. It should not always be adversarial, polarised or win-lose. There is a new independent chair who was supposed to play an interventionist role. He probably needs to knock our heads together and start to come up with solutions because so far there has been very little engagement. Were that to happen and were we to use conciliation, facilitation, mediation, rather than adjudication and arbitration, it might be a bit better for our members. We would have no confidence in the scheme as a legitimate forum in which to conduct our business.