Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Deputy's interest in this and his promoting of it but an amendment is short and it could create more challenges in the working out of the details. A lot of work has gone into this. Deputy Howlin has been in government. He is a veteran of Government as well as of Opposition. He tends to be a bit more radical when on the Opposition benches when it comes to the sharing of information and ideas. Seriously, however, a lot of work is going into this. I might surprise the Deputy on the timelines because I am anxious to get this done. It needs to be done. There are debates we will need to have. The pre-legislative scrutiny will cover some of the points made by Deputy Berry. If we consider the principle of the primacy of the civilian and military, where does that land? That is where I see the pre-legislative scrutiny and where I see the committee and ourselves teasing those things out when the legislation is published. It is not a fait accompli.

I genuinely make a plea to the Deputy not to force the issue because there is separate legislation coming focused on implementing the recommendation, but there are fundamental questions. Even as a former Minister for public expenditure the Deputy will be aware of what Deputy Berry is saying, for example. The Garda is not the Army and there are different considerations there. We need to be conscious of that. When there are questions asked in this House about the Garda and the reply is that it is an operational matter for the Garda Commissioner, every Deputy in the House gets frustrated when they hear that. It may be a matter of a Garda station closing down, for example, and the whole place here is in high dudgeon but this is what we all voted for. Now the Deputy wants us to vote that potentially the Chief of Staff could close a barracks or open a barracks or whatever. We need to tease it all out. I actually believe the Chief of Staff is an adviser to the Minister for Defence and does not have what we, from a lay perspective, see as a chief of staff role in the sense of absolute command. We want to change that and put that right, but there is a lot of detail in the how it is done. I look forward to the debate.

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