Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

That is fair enough. Many people serving in the Naval Service will welcome this new tax credit. It is important to establish, though, whether people in the Army and the Air Corps are going to get the same benefit. While service with the Naval Service at sea is a particular type of service, confining this tax credit to help boost after-tax pay to the Naval Service is wrong. The problem of recruitment and retention is most acute in the Naval Service. Ships are tied up and unable to go to sea because so many people are leaving the Naval Service, it is now understaffed and unable to manage the fleet.

We know the theory is that the ships not in use are meant to be in dry dock for repairs. I do not think that is true. Repairs are indeed ongoing, but some of the ships appear to have been tied up for a very long time. There is also the fact that personnel in the Army and Air Corps also go on missions to different areas. Many of those missions take place under the auspices of international bodies and there may be associated daily rates of pay. Those kinds of missions, however, may involve people being out of the country for long periods of time.

In previous discussions on the budget, I stated that we need a public commission on the future of our military. We need to decide what kind of Defence Forces we are going to have in the years to come. Are we going to have personnel serving in an extremely hierarchical model, more appropriate to about 100 years ago, or are we going to have a progressive military where opportunities for promotion to the higher ranks will not be confined to a few? In almost all armies around the world, people can enlist as ordinary personnel and then progress, if they are committed to the armed services, to becoming an officer. That is difficult to achieve in our Army, however, in the Air Corps, if slightly less, and in the Naval Service. We are in 2019 and yet people in the ranks are being treated in a far inferior way to people in the officer corps. That is simply because of a difference of two to three years' full-time education and training compared with those who have had the opportunity of becoming a cadet. Needless to say, many working-class people only qualify to enter the enlisted ranks and not the more senior ranks. Those people do not have an easy pathway to becoming officers.

What continues to be a feature of all of the services, particularly the Naval Service and Air Corps, is that personnel get excellent training which then qualifies them to take up jobs externally. What they do not have, however, is a clear internal promotional path, which means their earnings will always be low and they will never advance.

Pay needs to be addressed because some members of the Defence Forces are sleeping in cars and staying with relatives, while others are simply unable to provide for their families in the way that might be expected while they serve their country. Having Fine Gael in charge of defence for eight years has done unbelievable damage to the armed services. Many members of my family have served in the ranks. The Government must wake up and create modern Defence Forces that will be a credit to this country.

I had the opportunity to meet Irish personnel serving in Africa and other parts of the world. They have served with distinction and have been a credit to this country on the various missions they have undertaken. I would like to see fair play for the Army. The only way that Fine Gael will be able to sort out some of these issues is to have a proper commission for all the Defence Forces to produce a modern blueprint and pathways for personnel to have a decent career and, if it they are interested in doing so, to go forward and serve at officer rank, having developed the skills needed to do so.

The training in the armed services, which ranges from catering to transport and a host of other areas, can be very valuable. The apprenticeship system, which the Ceann Comhairle and others will be familiar with, was an important pathway for personnel to build up careers that they could then use when they left the services. It is a pity those have also been allowed to lapse.

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