Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 26 January 2017

Public Accounts Committee

2015 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 35 – Army Pensions
Vote 36 - Department of Defence
Chapter 8 – Disposal of the Government Jet

9:00 am

Mr. Maurice Quinn:

When one is costing the military and the Defence Forces, one is dealing with a contingent capacity available to the State, which can be used for a whole myriad of things when not in training. As the Deputy can see they are being used for ceremonial, disaster relief and everything else. We do not separate out individual pieces of it unless it is specifically sought. We would not present them as separate reports because we are using the capacity of the Defence Forces. In this case what we are extracting out to give the committee, is the additional cost in terms of, for example, security duty payments to members of the Defence Forces, fuel and so forth.