Mr. Martin Cooney:

With regard to DFR R5, this answer will cross the questions asked by Deputies Berry, Cronin and Stanton. Deputy Berry is 100% correct. Defence Force Regulation R5 is a statutory instrument. It is a piece of secondary legislation that requires the Minister to sign off. The powers that come down have to flow from the primary legislation. This is not something that is dynamic. I will keep repeating this. We are not dynamic. I have worked in the public sector. The Defence Forces have a very Civil Service-oriented mechanism in terms of administration. Deputy Berry will have seen this in his time in the Permanent Defence Force. If we want to do anything in the Defence Forces we make things happen with paper and not with action. It is all about the paperwork. There is nothing dynamic. Recruitment is not dynamic. We need to be dynamic. We should have a separate access stream for professionals with needed qualifications. They should not need medicals or the fitness test. As Deputy Cronin said, I do not need a doctor to walk up a hill with a general purpose machine gun; I need doctors for their skills. I do not need a plumber to do that either if what I need is a plumber. Why do we not have a separate stream for those personnel to come in?

I attended a talk in Boston from the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff of the US army General Martin Dempsey. He said that ten years ago the biggest threat to the US was not China or Russia but cyberterrorism and cyberattack. In December 2018 we made a submission to the Department of the Taoiseach in which we identified three main threats to the State. One was cyberterrorism and another was a pandemic. Both of these things have happened but we have not changed our Reserve to bring in a cyber element. I mentioned General Dempsey because he said he had to change his whole thought process around recruiting people into the US army because he was going to have to recruit divisions of fat people. He did not mean it in a pejorative way. He meant people who would not pass a fitness test. I do not mean it to come across as facetious but he meant it in a joking manner, in that these people would never ever get into the army that he came from. We need to be dynamic but we are not. Part of the reason we are not dynamic is due to our rules and our statutory instrument.

We should have an enabling mechanism. We could then have policies below it, as in any organisation, that allow people to be dynamic and change. We have this through administrative instructions which are the next tier down. What has happened in DFR R5 is that a provision has been added in whereby any administrative instruction the Defence Forces creates pursuant to DFR R5 has to be approved by the Minister. Now we have the Minister not only making the statutory instrument but having to approve how the Defence Forces operate. It is a third level of oversight. It is absolutely ridiculous. How can we be dynamic when the structures we put in place are not dynamic in the first instance and do not allow for any lateral thinking? There are only one or two ways to recruit and that is it. We cannot even bring in former members of the Permanent Defence Force because it is too difficult. I will make a point about the legislation on this separately.