Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The history of this is that when the private sector grows rapidly, it often puts pressure on certain elements of public sector employment, particularly in areas where the training and the quality of the personnel are as high as they are in the Defence Forces. The truth is that a lot of people in the Defence Forces were head-hunted by the private sector. For example, in Cork, many members of the Naval Service were effectively targeted as highly skilled and motivated engineers for the pharmaceutical sector and were offered big pay packets to leave. When we saw rapid employment growth over the past seven or eight years, that had an impact on retention within the Defence Forces generally.

We need to learn from that and we need to ensure that we introduce targeted incentives where appropriate to try to address it. The Air Corps is a good example of that. When pilots were in short supply in the private sector, a number of pilots left our Air Corps. When the aviation sector has got into trouble, we have seen some of them return through re-enlistment programmes and so on. We have also introduced financial incentives around retention for key skill sets. Pilots are a good example in the Air Corps. We are putting in place a similar type of scheme for the Naval Service. It is clearly a problem persuading people to go to sea in terms of lifestyle choice versus other options that are available to people. We need to incentivise people financially to go to sea, which is exactly what this new seagoing retention scheme is all about.

I hear what people are saying. I give some reassurance that this is not just about plans for the future. We are spending extra money now to improve our retention numbers and to increase recruitment. We are also setting up a commission in the next few weeks which will again look at all these things, including looking at international best practice. When Deputies see the membership of the commission they will see that we are taking these matters very seriously.

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