Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our guests. The general public got a wake-up call and an alert to the significance of our Defence Forces, and specifically our Naval Service, last week. That was good thing. It certainly is the case for some background. I wish to congratulate - as we all would - the personnel involved there.

There may be an element of repetition in my questioning now as a lot of the points have been made, but I propose to still continue because we all want to indicate our support and I want to explore areas of it.

It is clear that the Defence Forces have a real issue with recruitment and retention. The figures given by the witnesses show they are down to 7,671 on August 2023, which the witnesses said is 79% of the original. It is stark and it is a declining figure. Before I talk about retention, last week it emerged that the recruitment campaign currently in place is quite defective in a number of ways, is not high profile enough and is not placed enough in schools and so on. I believe it was Commandant Martin Ryan who said here that the best recruitment of all by a long shot is word of mouth, with happy personnel telling friends and family. Nothing substitutes for that. It is the absence of this that is really the problem. It works in every sector when people speak well of something. Nothing substitutes for word of mouth. I was involved in the retail sector in the past and no advertising campaign substitutes for good word of the service and so on. Commandant Ryan is absolutely right that therein lies the problem. That is related to all the other issues.

Among the reasons around the retention is obviously and as the witnesses have said the non-implementation of the working time directive, despite the commission recommendation. There has been no real progress there. This is important. It is important people have a level of certainty for their family life. People nowadays have a different set of expectations. I notice it in my own young family: their expectations of what they should have are very different from mine. Young people now expect a quality of life and certainly around time. There is not even a recording process and the Defence Forces is not implementing the EU law so there is a real problem there. We will try to advance that I presume, in co-operation with the Chair, and bring that to the Minister. As the Chair said in his introductory remarks, we will have to be very vigilant here. We will try to advance that and bring into focus the whole question of that part of it, and the others as well. Obviously that is critical to retention and quality of life, along with the word-of-mouth factor that Commandant Ryan spoke about.

In the context of retention, my colleague, Deputy Stanton, who has had to leave, raised a point that might crack it and solve it. The forces have made proposals and nothing has been done. Am I correct in my understanding that they have not even been responded to? If there was retention pay and incentives for long service that would work and that would get over the retention issues to a fair degree, coupled with other lifestyle issues. I believe this should be the case.

I put it to the Chair that we should speak to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Finance,Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach and perhaps to the Minister for Finance on the whole question of pensions from our perspective. I propose that for consideration. There is a problem with the whole State pension scheme. It is clearly not satisfactory for the Defence Forces. What came in during 2013 was an emergency response at a particular time and set of circumstances. The real issue at that time was retiring senior civil servants were reappearing in the service and having another income. There was a level of public outcry given there was a recession then. It was an emergency response to that. The pension situation needs a review. The finance committee and our committee need to review it. Maybe we should delve a bit more into it and get a greater understanding here. We should also be speaking to the Minister for Finance. I will leave that to the Chair and the clerk of the committee to see what we can do there. I certainly believe we need this, and I request the Chair to please look at that because it is an issue we should progress and could do a lot with. The very fact of us exploring it in public sessions would give the issue oxygen, which it needs.

As well as the pension, we need to look at rostering and certainty in timetabling, along with retention and pay. Those are the three major areas to explore and where we should assist. The Chair's comments at the outset are absolutely correct and come from his own ministerial experience. It behoves us to start monitoring and to start checking. This is why I suggest the interaction with the finance committee and other interactions. We must keep up periodic conversations with these people to see that we are monitoring and that we are getting a result. We should be doing that.

On the public perception, of course it is inherently wrong and beyond acceptable - needless to say - that there would be any issue of discrimination or any malpractice on gender grounds. Of course that is beyond and should not even be a subject for discussion or debate as it is a given. Not one of the five witnesses would dispute this. The entire Women of Honour situation, coupled with all these other issues - although not a substitute to dealing with the other substantive matters - has created an image issue, which would damage recruitment and it is a problem. In a perverse sense, it makes it all the more essential that we deal with the other issues. It needs to be dealt with. I am aware the witnesses are as anxious as anyone else in that regard. The whole area around the Women of Honour issue is very serious for the people outside these walls looking at it.

The events of last weekend have already been raised here - and I am sorry for the repetition - but it is important that we all state our support for the Defence Forces and where we stand on the issues. Last week I raised the issue of the retired members of the Permanent Defence Force, PDF, being able to be recruited into the Reserve Defence Force at the particular grade or officer level they left the PDF. This is an important issue and perhaps the witnesses will comment on that.

I appreciate that my queries contained a level repetition but the witnesses may notice that in all our contributions, there is a commitment to do something about it. I hope the Chair and the clerk of the committee propose some actions later as to how we could monitor this and stay on top of it.

It is shocking if we are told one week, as Deputy Carthy said at the outset, that the commission report is being implemented with gusto and if the witnesses, whose veracity, sincerity and competence we do not doubt, are here this week saying it is not. It behoves the committee to try to fill the gap, bridge the divide or do something.