Paul Kehoe (Wexford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Chambers referred to the UNIFIL mission. As he knows, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, cancelled all rotations of all of our UN missions.

This was always going to cause some distress to members of the Defence Forces and their families. My Department, the Defence Forces and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade got working to see if we could get our members home earlier than the end of June. I am glad to report that they will be home. We have secured two dates. I thank our UN ambassador, Geraldine Byrne Nason, for her efforts and all her work in that. Ireland is one of the first countries to be able to move out of the UNIFIL mission area. Our members will go into isolation at the weekend for two weeks before they go out. This has been a huge stress on all families. The Deputy referred to communications. When we are dealing with a large number of people, of course information is going to leak out to the media or whatever. There were mixed messages coming back. I was very clear that I did not want to go back to the families until I had a specific date on the return. There was a lot of misinformation out there that was not coming from me, the Department or military management. I know that this caused a great deal of anxiety among people. I am glad we were able to get our two people home from the Congo at the weekend as well.

The Deputy mentioned the high-level implementation plan. Covid-19 has impacted on the project timeframes. I met PDFORRA last week and have agreed to meet with RACO. I am aware that both representative associations have a number of issues that they want to raise with me. Much work has been done already on the high-level implementation plan. Independent chairs have been appointed to a number of the projects and work is ongoing. This will be a priority. There absolutely are challenges. I thought we would have been able to get some of the projects over the line but because of the amount of work involved, it has taken a great deal of time.

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