Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is welcome to the House. It is my first opportunity to welcome him here since he was elected. I thank him for his availability when we were looking for him. That is appreciated.

By and large, the budget has been a good one for the situation we find ourselves in. He is to be congratulated, with his colleague, for putting the budget together. Many people have been watching VAT and housing, and all of these things are important to the business world.

The Minister has plenty of colleagues over there to congratulate him so I will find one or two points to hit him with. First and foremost, I will start with his own backyard and the Naval Service. Currently, two ships are tied up. Our ships are there to protect €2.23 billion worth of assets. Since I mentioned that to the Minister for Finance, Deputy Donohoe, earlier today, I am told that there are $10 trillion worth of trade going through the information superhighway that travels under the sea and we do not have sufficient deep-sea divers to keep an eye on that and maintain its security. The refurbishment and reinvigoration of the Naval Service is something the Minister will have to tackle very quickly. I know the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Coveney, is already working with the Minister on that issue. It is an absolute outrage to have ships worth more than €10 million tied up.

The air search and rescue service is about to go to tender. In the next year €107 million has been allocated to that and some other areas. I think €60 million of it is for search and rescue. We have an Air Corps. Why are we using private companies? Could the Minister provide some assurance that the Air Corps will be invited to tender and make sure that it will have the resources it needs to tender for search and rescue? It is a ten-year contract. One cannot imagine what it will do to the morale of the Air Corps to find itself back again, front and centre, where it is needed.

My colleague in the Lower House, Deputy Berry, mentioned the elevation of the Military College to a proper third level establishment given its links with Maynooth university and Carlow-Waterford technological university, which is not yet established but will be fairly soon. Some 129 houses owned by the Department of Defence, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, and the Minister's Department owns a couple of them, are boarded up, apart from the ones where there are overstayers, and being allowed to fall into an outrageous level of disrepair when we have homeless people in the country. I would like to see a commitment from the Minister to pull together the other Departments to put some of the 12,000 houses we are going to build into military barracks for military families. The refurbishment of barracks is a very important issue. We have Brexit coming down the line and we may finish up needing a border. We also have a pandemic where the conditions in the North of Ireland are now getting drastically out of hand. We may need to close the Border for health purposes, so the Defence Forces will be crucial.

I will finish on this point about looking after public servants. I refer to people in this House, the Lower House and those who lost their seats in the last election, who are on class K PRSI. There is no benefit whatsoever. That is outrageous, having served their country for four years. We are all waiting for the implementation of the Moorhead report. I hope we will see it in the Finance Bill.