Mr. Neil Richardson:

I will address Deputy Brady's question. He has shown an understanding of this issue. It has been one for many years and "timelines" is the key word. On average, it takes a year to 18 months for an applicant to join the Reserve, from the day he or she applies online to the day they can be sworn in or attested, which is the official word. It can take a year to 18 months and the various stages they have to go through, be it interviews, fitness tests, medical exams or whatever it might be, can often be arranged months apart to the point that, as the Deputy quite rightly said, when people are recontacted when it is time for the next part of the recruitment process, they have simply lost interest because many months have passed since the Defence Forces last communicated with them. The Deputy specifically mentioned 2019. Of the several thousand applicants we had that year, 144 people were successfully attested at the end of the year.

If I go back a few more years, the figures are quite stark. There were 4,870 applicants in 2014. The question is often thrown at us whether an interest in joining the Reserve is still there among the public in the State. Some 5,000 applicants for that competition, out of which we attested 157, would suggest "yes". I do not believe for a moment that all these people failed their interviews, medical exams or fitness tests. It is likely that several months after the last stage at which they were contacted they had grown uninterested. For any organisation to take 18 months for applicants to get in the door, it is a miracle we still have 144 people left at the end of the process. It attests to their desire to join.

Two years ago, when we last appeared before this committee, we talked about our strength figure at the time. We are now 33% down on that strength figure. Even with the trickle of attestations we have had over the past number of years, we are on a net loss, year-on-year. We are now one third smaller than we were two years ago when we last appeared before this committee. At present, that is the main problem. We even have instances involving medical resourcing and getting Defence Force medicals for recruits, which is a massive issue in that reservists are, unfortunately, last on the list of priorities in accessing a military doctor. Sometimes the process takes so long that the medical they get is void after a 12-month wait, so another medical is needed. This is not only a waste of resources; it shows how long the process can go on for.

If this continues, and was to keep going for another couple of years, we could be before this committee again in two years' time saying there are 500 of us left. As Mr. Gargan quite rightly pointed out, a certain number of personnel in certain ranks is needed in order to form a training staff for new recruits. We are getting to the point where cobbling together training staff to train these new people will be difficult. Even if they handed us 1,000 recruits in the morning, we may shortly get to a point where we physically cannot train them. I have, hopefully, addressed that issue.

I would like to, however, segue into answering Senator O'Reilly's question on funding, paired with Deputy Brady's question on the budget. As Mr. Gargan said, it is hard to put a figure on it but I will point out to Deputies and Senators the way the €2.15 million is structured. The RDF allocation in Vote 36 is designed to allow a full-strength Reserve of 4,000 personnel, with seven paid days each a year. The idea is if there were 4,000 of us, we would all get seven paid days a year. The problem is that most Reserve training courses are 14 days, 21 days or 28 days. There is a problem straight away in that we will be victims of our own success if we have a full-strength Reserve since we would be asking Reservists to either undertake, possibly, 25% of a paid training course and do the rest voluntarily, which is not feasible, or we simply would not be able to attend the training course because we would not have the paid day allocation to provide. The whole system is structured in such a way that we would be victims of our own success if we had 4,000 people. We simply could not survive on seven paid days each a year. That is something that will have to be addressed.

Concurrently with capital investment, as was mentioned earlier, a geographical expansion is the way to get the Reserve back up to full strength and back into communities, which was a great strength of the old FCA in decades past. However, that would involve the renting or purchasing of suitable training facilities in the county. At the moment, our budget is solely for pay. However, a form of Reserve-specific capital investment would also be needed to facilitate that expansion. It could not all be about man days, or paid days as they are referred to.