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

All I will say to the committee is that we are working on this. I spoke to the Minister for Health about it as recently as last week and he also understands the urgency of the situation. It is not just the Defence Forces, by the way; other people are waiting for this and it needs to be paid soon. To be fair, the Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, is very much on the same page in wanting to move this on.

The working time directive will require legislation. It will not be through statutory instruments; it will require legislation. Some exemptions are needed to make sure the military can do what it needs to do in the environments in which its personnel work. As far as I am concerned, however, where work can be scheduled in terms of training programmes and so on, we should be consistent with the working time directive in as many areas as we possibly can while, at the same time, ensuring that the Chief of Staff and his team are happy that they can deliver for the State in the areas in which they are expected to deliver from a defence and security perspective.

In terms of Deputy Cowen's questions, this was very much a joint commitment in the programme for Government. It has been transformative for the Defence Forces and now we need to deliver it and accelerate its implementation. In my view as Minister for Defence, when we get to level of ambition 2, we should not be stopping there. I would like to see a future Government make a decision to go beyond level of ambition 2 because I think we need to. As an international non-military aligned neutral country, capacity probably needs to in time go beyond level of ambition 2. We have to get there first as a staging point, however. That is what the Government has made a decision on. Between now and 2028, we get to level of ambition 2 and then we build from there if a future Government decides that is the right thing to do. We will have done much of the work in advance of that to actually prepare for that decision if we want to go beyond level of ambition 2 at that point. As the commission said, however, we cannot get to level of ambition 3 unless we put the foundations and platform in place that is level of ambition 2, which is where we are heading.

On when the implementation plan will be agreed, first of all, we have agreed much implementation already in the 38 areas in which there are early actions under way. If members look at the high-level implementation plan that is in place already, each action has next to it a label of "Further Evaluation", "Accept in Principle", "Accept" or "Revert". Therefore, members can see exactly what we have committed to do on all of the 130 areas. What we do not have yet is a timeline in terms of the delivery of each of them and that is what we will have to develop in terms of the civil military co-operation that is going on at the moment. The implementation of that, of course, will be overseen by the oversight group, which will have an independent chair. It is really important that we have an independent chair who is outside the public and Department systems, as well as the Defence Forces system and that he or she is seen as genuinely independent and, obviously, competent to do it.