Mr. Conor King:

I thank Senator O'Reilly for his questions. He Senator mentioned the working time directive. It is worthy of repetition because it is an extremely important retention initiative. We have come to the table, we have done our work and done our research, and we are looking for a bit of certainty for members to enable the organisation to retain them and to do well for the organisation. We always come with optimism and with a constructive attitude and approach.

On our members' euro, we brought in people from German, from Sweden, from the Garda and from the legal profession. We ran an entire two-day conference in Cork devoted to the implementation of the working time directive and brought everybody from military management and from the Department of Defence who was interested to get things moving, and our members paid for that.

On the collective agreement and the implementation of the directive, the reason it was stalled for a number of years is because the Department of Defence, in particular, and the military leadership were worried it would have an impact on operations, and then all of a sudden a European Court of Justice ruling, called the Obrambo judgment, came out from Slovenia. That judgment basically said that a number of areas can be deemed out of scope of the directive. That gave carte blanchefor our leadership and our management to say we can do that too. Instead of comparing ourselves to Germany and the UK, all of a sudden we are comparing ourselves to Slovenia. Never before has that happened. It was a new one on us. That meant they were free to come into discussions knowing they could legally rule a number of things out of scope. It is not that they had to but they could choose to do so.

What we need is a collective agreement that does not deem unnecessary operations and training out of scope and that looks after members in terms of certainty, time off, etc. Otherwise, if something is brought in through the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment in a heavy-handed way and it does not meet the needs of members in terms of recruitment and retention, it will be a catalyst for further departures. I am not trying to be pessimistic here. I am trying to be realistic because we owe our members a degree of realism and truth. That is our job.

In relation to the retired members of the Permanent Defence Force, I would have covered that response for Deputy Stanton. We have heard the first-line Reserve is a fantastic means of augmenting the Permanent Defence Force. We should be making the pathway to join the first-line Reserve a lot easier for people who are retiring.