Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Ceann Comhairle for choosing this Topical Issue matter and the Minister of State, Deputy Brophy, for taking the place of the Minister for Defence.

Our search and rescue operators are the people who go out in all weathers, conditions and days of the year to bring us safely home. They are there when boats go missing, swimmers get lost, climbers fall, walkers go astray and when people on the edge take their own lives. I pay my respects to the men and women of the State who have lost their lives in the service of search and rescue. Their names are etched in our national heart and all of them are greatly loved and missed.

Our Air Corps is an integral part of that service and we are very lucky to have it. We look up and see the Air Corps top cover in the sky, and we know that help is on the way to someone in danger. We depend on that cover, just as we value the officers who provide it. When Air Corps worries were personally relayed to the Tánaiste, Deputy Varadkar, he said he could not deal with them due to ethics. Then he went and leaked a confidential Government document to a personal friend, illustrating Fine Gael's commitment to private service for the few and not public service for all. That is how the public reads this.

In contrast, the Air Corps is there for everyone and it works for everyone. Apart from their expertise, these exemplary public servants put their lives on the line to give hope and confidence when all seems lost. Now it looks like we could lose them further and lose their service, because the Government is putting the search and rescue service contract out for tender again.

It is another controversial contract, which is worth more than €60 million a year for ten years, to provide four helicopters and an aircraft. That amounts to more than €0.5 billion of Irish taxpayers' money, when our Air Corps, for all intents and purposes, could do it for half the sum. Six private companies are expected to bid, including two, at last count, from abroad. Therefore, a private foreign company paid by Irish public money could base its search and rescue aircraft not here, where we are paying for it, but in Britain. Equally, that British private company, paid by Irish public money, could be the very company reported in the Irish media as carrying out clandestine operations for the British Ministry of Defence.

This tendering of the contract for our search and rescue services could have a serious impacts in the following ways: first, privatising yet another public service and using public money to do it; second, ignoring the worries of Air Corps officers about Irish military intelligence and the lack of control and oversight of data and what happens in British airfields; and third, downgrading the Air Corps, which is a vital part of our long-neglected and undervalued Defence Forces to the point that it could disappear over the Government's privatisation horizon. To add insult to injury, this is a flagrant breach of the commitments made in the programme for Government.

We need to know vastly more about the plans for this tendering process and why the Minister for Defence is content to further undermine our Defence Forces. Why not recognise the expertise that is still in our Air Corps? Why not invest in our Air Corps and stop further privatisation? Why would the Minister for Defence even consider a private company, which has been reported in the media as being involved in clandestine operations for the British Ministry of Defence, and why would he do this over the heads of our own outstanding Irish Air Corps and despite the intelligence concerns of its officers? These are the questions I am being met with in Kildare, and I am interested in the response of the Minister of State.

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