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

As the Deputy will be aware, we have spoken on many occasions, and I suspect we will do so on many occasions in the future, about our efforts to improve retention rates within the Defence Forces, to keep people in the Defence Forces for longer and to extend the time people are able to stay in the Defence Forces. We have made some progress on that in the past year. This year we have seen 30 more people retiring than we were expecting. We were anticipating approximately 400 and it will be 430. The real challenge here - there is daily working going on between the Department and Chief of Staff and his team - is in terms of new recruitment campaigns and, of course, incentives to keep people in the Defence Forces. That is an ongoing discussion. There is no one document.

There is a new recruitment and retention strategy being finalised at present. I meet the Chief of Staff and his team along with my senior management team every month to talk about recruitment and retention because this is the biggest challenge for me, as Minister for Defence, and for the Defence Forces. If we are to deliver the potential of the commission report, we need to see quite a dramatic change, but that has to start by stopping the losses. We will see a reduction in the numbers in the Permanent Defence Force this year from last year. It will still be well over 8,000. Some people have talked about it falling below 8,000. My projections are that it will be more than 8,100, but it is still far too low. We need to reverse that from next year on if we are to start delivering on the ambition of that commission report and, of course, the Government-approved plan on the back of it. To do that, we will need to recruit a lot more people. We are planning for that in terms of infrastructure. We will turn Gormanston into a large specialist training centre that can deal with much higher numbers.

We must also try to impact on the numbers choosing voluntarily to retire early to enter other professions and who are getting headhunted by different companies etc., whether it be pilots leaving the Air Corps to go into commercial airlines or whether it be engineers in Haulbowline getting sucked into the pharmaceutical companies, medtech companies or whatever, and likewise with the Army. Many of the skill sets we need are also needed by the private sector and we are trying to put packages in place that can keep people in the Defence Forces for longer. That is one of the reasons we made some of the early changes. People who join the Defences Forces effectively have an improvement in their salary of approximately €5,000, from €30,000 to €35,000, when some of the changes we have made in terms of access to full military service allowance, MSA, etc. are included.

That is an ongoing effort. I suspect every time I am in front of the committee here, we will be talking about recruitment and retention for the next three or four years.

I hope we see a start of the reversal of that trend next year and we will build from there. Regarding investment in infrastructure, we plan to increase the numbers next year but increase them significantly the year after that in terms of capacity for recruitment and training. I hope by the end of the year we will have made considerable progress in recruiting a new head of transformation and a new head of HR in the Defence Forces. Both of those people are likely to be civilians. A considerable amount is happening in this space but I am more than aware of the challenges we face and I am reminded of them all the time when I hear different commentary on defence.

The Deputy's second question is a very fair one which officials in the Department have been working hard to try to answer. Defence Forces pensions are different from pensions in virtually any other area of the public service. Deputy Berry will know that as he has been in the Defence Forces. They are linked to allowances throughout a person's career. It is not like a teacher, a civil servant or even a garda who retires where the pension is related to a percentage of salary. The calculation of a Defence Forces pension varies with each individual person, depending on their career and various allowances they had at different times. It is not as simple as applying a different rate. We need to go through virtually every individual pension and there are more than 13,000 of them. It will take a bit longer.

The plan is to focus on the 3% February increase and related arrears to try to get that element of the payment out this year and to ensure that the payment is made before Christmas because we know that people with families want money before Christmas and we want to get them as much as we can. We will then effectively top that up with the payment related to the September increase in the payment agreement. That will be done in January or February of the new year. I want to be upfront about that rather than pretending we will pay everything before Christmas; we cannot do that. We are focusing on the larger sum so that we can get as much money out to former Defence Forces personnel as we can before Christmas. Effectively, that means getting it done before 6 or 7 December because that is the last payment run, which only gives us a few weeks. We have really turned our system upside down to try to get something paid, which we will do, but the remainder will be paid early in the new year.