Lisa Chambers (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Does the Minister of State hear what he is reading out to me? He has spoken previously about challenges in terms of attracting people and then he tells me there were over 5,000 applicants but less than 100 were inducted. Does he not see that there is a major problem with the Reserve Defence Forces? With every month that goes by in which we do not take people in, the Government is killing that organisation piece by piece. It will not exist in a number of years. That is a fact. We have people retiring who are fed up with the way the organisation is being run. The single force concept does not appear to be working and it may be that we need to rejig it.

The Government must put in place set timelines for the Defence Forces to process the applications of Reserve applicants. The fact is that the Permanent Defence Forces are under severe pressure because of years of cuts. They do not have the staff to process these applications. Processing Reserve applications probably ranks way down on the list of priorities. I tell the Minister of State in the Chamber today that what is happening is that those applications are sitting on someone's desk for months on end and they are not being processed. When they are got around to, perhaps people have run out of time. People are being asked two and three times to apply for Garda clearance. These are people who are asking to volunteer for their country and they are being treated in this manner.

Unless the Minister of State takes it upon himself to put set timelines in place for processing applications so that people get a response within a set timeframe and know what they are dealing with, we will have this problem again in two months and in six months. In two years, we will be back to talk about why the Reserve Defence Forces are ceasing to exist.

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