Willie O'Dea (Limerick East, Fianna Fail)

First, to respond to a question asked by Deputy O'Shea, those sent will be specialists, such as mechanics, IT people and engineers, etc. These are the types of people we are targeting.

With regard to Deputy Deenihan's question on whether we will have legislation along the lines of the UK legislation, I imagine that will be factored in when the legislation is drafted. We must provide for something along those lines. We are getting over the problem temporarily by recruiting people from the Defence Forces Reserve into the Permanent Defence Forces so as to keep within the legislation. These people will leave the PDF a short time after their return. We will have to consider something along the lines of job protection.

On the first line reserve, we are still at the early stages and have made no significant progress. We are concentrating on upping the numbers of the integrated reserve to come somewhere near the targets we set out in the White Paper.

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