Mr. Conor King:

On the battle group, from our perspective, it is a policy matter. The commitment of the battle group supersedes the commitment for UNDOF. One overseas mission with high intensity and high tempo is being removed for a battle group, surrounding which there is an awful lot of uncertainty. When I say there is uncertainty, both we and PDFORRA have sought details on the human factors of the battle group. Will allowances be paid? What will the time off be? It is simple stuff but we have not received those responses. We cannot then go to our members and tell them to go for the battle group and volunteer. We have to remain silent because we have no information. Unless there is an attractive incentive to sign up for a two-year commitment in the battle group, they will not. Currently, people do not know whether they will get leave, they cannot go overseas and they do not know whether they can do career or any sort of skills courses in that time. They may be deployed overseas for a minimum of six weeks and, possibly, if the battle group deploys, it could be a number of months. Unless people know that simple yet extremely important information, they cannot be incentivised to jump on board. I think it will be difficult to fill that without the information. However, I cannot comment on the appropriateness of us getting involved in those structures.

On the collective agreement, it is described to us as very technical but, to me, it is quite simple.

We sign up to the public service stability agreements every couple of years. We are about to negotiate another one as associate members of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. That is a collective agreement. We are already involved in collective agreements, yet when we asked for a collective agreement like that which An Garda Síochána has, whose members have largely the same status as us in terms of employee rights, we were told, “No, you are not a trade union so you cannot have a collective agreement.” That is very disheartening because it is reliant on legislation from 1942, 50 years before the advent of representation in the Defence Forces. When we are told there is a problem with legislation and for that reason a collective agreement cannot be laid out or developed, we feel it is reasonable to ask whether we can amend the legislation to allow us to have a collective agreement and be able to get behind the implementation of something that will affect every single one of our members, sell it to the members and bring it along. It is organisational change 101.

The Deputy asked had there been engagement on the pension issue. There has been engagement with Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform following a long campaign to try to get in the door. Unfortunately, the door was quite firmly shut in our faces by saying this was a policy decision to save money for the Exchequer and that, really, we were no different from the rest of the public sector. There is an interdepartmental working group ongoing but we have been told it is not looking at supplementary pension for fast accruals. It is looking at the expansion of the mandatory retirement age. We were told the extension of the mandatory retirement age for our members would be looked at in 2017-2018. We are still waiting on that. Every year or month that goes by, those who have stayed until the mandatory retirement age are being forced to leave the organisation. An early decision on that would be helpful for people’s family lives and their future in the organisation.

I was asked what the review of the conciliation and arbitration scheme needs to find. I will not prejudge what a review of a scheme needs to find. All I can say is that there are obvious drawbacks to the scheme as it currently exists. We have an excellent independent chair but he is not able to play a key interventionist role as he is supposed to. We need an annual report on progress or lack thereof. This is basic stuff. It is simple things like minutes of meetings and independent secretarial support because, unfortunately, the dominant position of the official side has been used to, perhaps, influence the secretary of the conciliation and arbitration scheme to not pass on information that we would have said was within the auspices of the scheme. I will say no more because we are in the middle of a review and I would not like to prejudice its outcome.