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

I will answer Deputy Richmond's second question first. Work being undertaken includes the provision of a new cadet school in the Curragh Camp, the development of the university students administrative complement, USAC, student facility in Galway, the development of a new military medical facility and other facilities to improve Casement Aerodrome, accommodation upgrades in multiple locations throughout the country, such as at Collins and McKee Barracks and at the naval base in Haulbowline. This year, I opened new, modern gym facilities at the barracks in both Limerick and Kilkenny. That is just a flavour of the capital infrastructure investment we are undertaking.

As I said earlier regarding the challenges around recruitment and retention in the Naval Service, we have a capital investment programme that is worth more than €70 million for Haulbowline alone. We opened a refurbished accommodation building of a really high standard there last month, as well as a new jetty facility that has significantly improved the capacity of the naval base. Work will start on two more buildings in the first quarter of next year to upgrade office accommodation and other forms of accommodation in Haulbowline. We are also starting to plan for a new gymnasium there. We know there is a lot of physical infrastructure that needs to be upgraded. I have talked about Haulbowline but I could say the same about the Curragh and many other key barracks around the country.

Regarding funding certainty, the whole point of the commission's report was to set a horizon in the future, set targets as to where we need to be by then and give funding certainty in terms of what is needed to get us there. That is the advantage of having the commission report. We have agreement by way of a Government decision that by 2028, we will have the equivalent spend on defence and military equipment of €1.5 billion in January 2022 value.

In other words, it will have to be linked to military inflation. In my view, by 2028 that will mean a figure close to €2 billion in defence spending, which effectively means increasing it from €1.1 billion to close to €2 billion over a six-year period. That is the kind of certainty the Department of Defence needs and the Defence Forces and their Chief of Staff need in order to be able to plan for an investment programme in subsea capacity and primary radar capacity, to get a multirole vessel into our naval fleet, which will be the largest ever ship we have had in our fleet when it is delivered, and to get new CASA aircraft in the sky, new Mowag Piranha III armoured personnel carriers and whatever else we decide to do. Defence has never had that kind of funding certainty before, but we have it now.

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