Mr. Conor King:

I thank the Deputy. We are not here to grandstand or sensationalise; we are here looking for help.

We welcome the suggestion Senator O'Reilly made about oversight. It is important because we are seeing slippage in plans we were promised would be delivered. We went to our members and said to stick it out because the Commission on the Defence Forces was going to deliver for them. When it does not, people get a little disconsolate. We have a poor track record of implementation, from the White Paper on Defence to the Public Service Pay Commission high-level implementation plan. When we see the early actions, to be completed within six months, still not completed 14 months later, we have cause for concern.

The Deputy talked about cybersecurity and the communications and information services, CIS, officers. It is an outrageous anomaly that one third of our CIS technical officers are being paid appropriately. They are not valued. They have a sense of purpose and loyalty, but when they are not valued, that only lasts so long, especially when they are so highly trained and so needed in the State in both the private sector and public sector. That is really a glaring own goal.

Regarding the pay per hour, the Deputy hit the nail on the head. It is difficult to make a value judgment on the adequacy of rates of pay when you do not know how many hours your employees are working. That is shameful. It should not be the case. It should not be accepted that a member cannot go home to his or her wife, husband or child and say what his or her hourly rate of pay or working week is. The irony of it is that it is public knowledge that tenders have gone out for instructors in niche capabilities in the Defence Forces because of a failure to retain people who must have previous Defence Forces experience but who are being asked to come back in as contractors on multiples of the salaries of the people they are going to be working beside. They will have a defined working day and week and access to the working time directive. What sort of message does that send to the people who have stayed? We see the same thing replicated in the Air Corps with technicians, in the CIS corps and in the medical corps with locums and so on. We have obvious solutions for retention we really just need to implement.