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

More generally on the wage issue, let us not forget that the Defence Forces are part of the public sector pay negotiation. Both PDFORRA, which has been campaigning on this issue for years, and the Representative Association of Commissioned Officers, RACO, asked me to facilitate the associate membership of their organisations in the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU, for the purposes of this round of pay negotiations and we have done that, which is a first.

If the Defence Forces' representative bodies are part of that ICTU structure now, it is difficult to ask for separate treatment of wages outside of the public sector pay deal. Having said that, we need to attract the right skill set, particularly specialists, into the Defence Forces. I believe we will see some civilianisation also in some of this space which can work, just like we have seen civilianisation within An Garda Síochána, which has worked quite well. We will be exploring various different approaches but undoubtedly the Deputy is correct in that we need to get skill sets that can deal at a senior level with the cyber security threat and we will need to compete with the private sector to get that skill set. That will not be easy.

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