Mr. Neil Richardson:

In a nutshell, yes. To explain the sequence of events, new pay guidelines came out in 2023, which were drafted by military management - the military side of the house - with the support and awareness of the Department of Defence. This resulted in a budgetary overrun of €189,000 that year and a supplementary budget was provided for. It resulted in an overrun of €863,000 last year, but that was directly a result of a 300% recruitment increase. That supplementary budget was also provided for. Suddenly, in the past couple of weeks, there has been a retraction of that pay guidance. It has been replaced with something far more stringent that has caused quite a degree of concern and distress among members. We are trying to figure out the logical sequence as to how these decisions were made or how the directives were arrived at. It seems no one had a problem with the new pay guidance until all of a sudden there was a problem. We have raised this problem quite vocally. We now have an offer to remedy that problem via a change to regulations, which is more or less putting in place what was in place a couple of weeks ago. Realistically, the way to solve this once and for all is to change two paragraphs of Defence Forces' regulation R5 to include that we can be paid for legitimate military activities. This would remove any ambiguity about what members can and cannot be paid for. It would remedy the problem once and for all.