Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Government is fully committed to ensuring the Defence Forces have the necessary resources to deliver on all of their assigned roles, as evidenced by an allocation of more than €1 billion to the defence sector, to include Army pensions, in 2019. This allocation includes full funding for the pay and allowances of the target strength of 9,500 Permanent Defence Force personnel, as set out in the White Paper on Defence.

The Government is extremely conscious about issues surrounding recruitment and retention within the Defence Forces, which is why these matters have been referred to the Public Service Pay Commission for consideration. This is the right body to examine conditions in the Defence Forces. It is independent and has received submissions from management, both military and civil, and from the representative associations. The Defence Forces have been able to feed into this process; it was part of the consultation. The report is due to be published shortly, and we look forward to its outcomes.

Similar to other sectors within the public service, the pay of Permanent Defence Force personnel was reduced as one of the measures to assist in stabilising national finances during the financial crisis. The recovery in the economy has provided the fiscal resources to provide for a fair and sustainable recovery in public service pay scales. Like other areas of the public sector, members of the Defence Forces are benefitting from pay increases in accordance with national public service pay agreements. The focus of these increases is weighted in favour of those on lower pay. The Public Service Stability Agreement 2018-2020 provides for increases in pay ranging from 6.2% to 7.4% over the lifetime of the agreement and will see restoration of public sector pay scales to levels that obtained before the financial emergency measures in the public interest, FEMPI, for all those earning under €70,000.

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