Mr. Neil Richardson:

It absolutely is a problem. Barrack closures mean people are travelling double the distance they formerly did to attend training and so on. The gratuity was taken from us under the 2012 value-for-money review under the auspices of providing a force of 4,069 members with 41,000 paid training man-days per year. However, the force has never reached that capacity because it was never enabled to do so.

We currently have only 26,000 paid training man-days per year. The very reasons the gratuity was taken from RDF members were never met or we were never helped in meeting them. It dissolves immediately the reasons the gratuity was taken away.

These costs are becoming more and more of an issue. To give an anecdotal example, for someone who joins the Reserve in Castlebar, his or her main training location for weekends might be Athlone Barracks, which is quite a considerable distance away. Now that reservist is being expected to pay for travel back and forth for however many weekends or weeks during the year. If one presents this to a potential recruit, the recruit says, " I am not paying to join the force. That is ridiculous.", and simply does not apply. If the gratuity had been retained, it would make it at least cost-neutral for them to join and that could seriously increase our numbers.