Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am happy to answer those questions given how efficient the committee was in moving through the Bill. We have a few minutes.

On the Deputy's first question, the Bill provides for significant enhancement of the powers of the military police in relation to the collection of evidence to assist their investigations. It was not possible, however, to address all issues relating to the power of the military police in this legislation. As regards powers of arrest and detention, the current legislative provisions are set out in section 171 of the Defence Act 1954. This provides that "Any person subject to military law, who has committed, is found committing, is suspected of being about to commit, or is suspected of or charged under this Act with having committed an offence against military law, may be placed under arrest."

The military authorities have examined the regulatory provision in the Defence Act and regulations made thereunder relating to the military police, especially the powers of arrest and detention of persons subject to military law. The issues arising from that review with the military authorities are currently being considered within the Department.

The process is likely to take in some time, however, in view of the complexity of the subject matter.

There will be a requirement to carefully examine all relevant matters, including issues relating to powers of arrest and detention, the appropriate checks, balances and oversight requirements and having regard to the equivalent legislation relating to An Garda Síochána, namely, the Criminal Justice Act 1984. In advance of any extension of the current military police powers of arrest and detention, detailed consideration will have to be given to checks and balances that have been incorporated into criminal justice legislation in respect of persons who have been arrested and detained, and whether and how these provisions should be provided for in defence legislation. In addition, the Law Reform Commission, as part of its fifth programme of law reform, is carrying out a review of the existing legislative provisions regulating detention in Garda custody. Any findings arising from the Law Reform Commission will have to be considered in the context of any update of military police legislation, including how those findings are reflected in civil law. There will also be a requirement to obtain detailed advice from the Attorney General before proceeding with any proposed legislation or regulatory changes. We are looking at this issue, but a number of other matters happening in parallel may inform the conclusions we draw. It is a civil military discussion, to be honest, and I suspect that we may introduce some new legislation in that regard, although perhaps not until the back end of the year. I do not want to put a specific timeline on it, but there are some issues there, as the Deputy highlighted.

In respect of the Commission on the Defence Forces, a lot of work is going on. I have said I wanted to bring a paper to the Government responding to the commission report in June, and that is what we are going to try to do. There are about 130 recommendations in the report including sub-recommendations and so on, 69 of which are key. The context within which we are considering this has changed in light of the war in Ukraine. Every country in the European Union is now looking again at defence provision and security issues. I do not think we should have a knee-jerk reaction in that regard, but we are certainly living in a far more unpredictable and unstable security environment, not just on this Continent but globally, and we need to respond to that. My focus is on ensuring the evidence base that has been put in front of us in this commission report, which I believe is very good work, can be a very solid basis for making those decisions. All the asks in the commission report, or at least the vast majority of them, cost money, so I will need to consult party leaders and other Ministers to ensure that what I bring to the Government will be supported. There will be a great deal of work on that over the next six or eight weeks before we bring a report to the Government. Once that happens, it will, I hope, be discussed in this committee and in the Dáil and Seanad. The Chief of Staff and his team and my Secretary General and her team are working intensively to ensure we can bring that forward.

The recommendation of the report is clear such that staying at the current level of ambition regarding defence provision in Ireland is not credible in terms of what we are asking of our Defence Forces versus the resourcing we provide for them and their capacity, and that needs to change. One reason I wanted to be Minister for Defence again related to the fact I wanted to correct that imbalance. Now we have an independent evidence base, on the back of 13 months of work by the commission, to strengthen that argument. There have been decades of underinvestment in defence infrastructure in Ireland by successive Governments going back to the 1970s, and we need to correct that. We cannot do it overnight. Even we could do it financially overnight, the Defence Forces would not be able to respond to a dramatic increase in financial resourcing in one or two years. The most important element of the Defence Forces is human resources, and even if we moved to the second level of ambition, which is what the commission report recommends, that will involve an additional 2,000 people in the Permanent Defence Forces as well as significantly increasing the numbers in the reserve. Given we are 1,000 people below where we should be, that would effectively involve increasing our Permanent Defence Forces by 3,000 people. Even if we were to add 500 people net each year into our Defence Forces, it would take us six years to get there, and we have never been able to add 500 people net into our Defence Forces in a 12-month period.

These are significant challenges, and that is just the human resources recruitment and retention challenge, not to mention the structural change that is proposed within the report. The commission report is very demanding of the Government. It shines a light on defence in a way that we have not seen before, with an independence evidence base exposing the lack of capacity in certain areas. That is not news to me, but it will, I hope, allow me to make a strong case to the Government that we need to correct it and set in train an investment programme that will increase defence budgets for a multi-annual period to get us to a more credible space in terms of defence. We have fantastic personnel in our Defence Forces. We have great training programmes and we are really good at what we do in, not least in peacekeeping, as well as many of the tasks we perform at home, whether at sea, on land or in the air. Nevertheless, there is a resourcing issue. Ireland is an outlier - there is no question of that now - and we have in this report a clear series of numbers that shows Ireland has fallen well behind its peer countries in the EU. Some of them are militarily non-aligned, some are neutral, while others are NATO member states; it is a series of different countries. We spend on average about one third of what other countries of a similar size spend on defence. That equates to approximately 0.3% of GDP, or 0.5% of GNI*, which is often used. If it is measured as a percentage of our overall budget, or as a spend per capitain Ireland, all those numbers are in the annexe of the commission report and, regardless of what metric is used, we spend about one third of what other countries spend, all of which are now talking about the need to spend more. What the commission report recommends is not a militarisation of Ireland or anything like that but rather a move from spending about one third of other countries spend to spending about half of what they spend. We will still be a significant outlier in terms of spend and capacity. Obviously, if we were to move beyond the second level of ambition to the third level, that would be a different prospect, although it would be a complex one to address because the commission did not go into the detail of what that resourcing would fund. It outlined some of it but not much.

That is the work that is ongoing. As I said, the report is a very demanding of the Government, as well as of the Defence Forces themselves in terms of cultural, structural and leadership change and how they operate. Moreover, the Department of Defence is significantly challenged by the report in respect of the interaction between civil and military management and everything from the Accounting Officer role to resourcing, recruitment and retention, cultural change and a range of other matters. It is very important work.

The Commission on the Defence Forces' report is the most important document on defence in 50 years in Ireland, or at least it will be if we act on it. I will visit Baldonnel later this afternoon. I have been to Collins Barracks in Cork, Haulbowline and Cathal Brugha Barracks.

I am essentially visiting all the barracks around the country to speak face-to-face with our Defence Forces personnel and to talk about their ambitions for the future, their views on the commission report and how we can collectively respond to it. I will continue that over the next few weeks. This is not the Department or the Minister dictating to the Defence Forces. This is very much a partnership between the Defence Forces, the Government and the Department of Defence to bring about quite fundamental change. I look forward to bringing it to Government and hopefully getting the support of my colleagues and other parties in opposition because this is going to impact on defence for the next 20 eyras. There will be different Governments in that period and what we need is a consistency of approach, if possible, from parties that will lead or be part of Governments in the future in order that the Defence Forces have clarity, both on what is being asked of them and how that will be resourced. I will be trying to bring on board everybody who wants to be part of the action plan off the back of this report to make sure it is consistent, credible and ambitious.