Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. It is a happy day for people in the Government because there is something for everybody in the audience and we should all be cheering. However, it would be remiss of me to stand here today and not find something wrong. From that point of view, budget 2025 has proved to me that Ireland is not a poor country by any measure. Indeed, our economy outperforms the economies of our EU peers for the most part. The question is this: are we good Europeans? Let me begin with my normal area, which is defence. I welcome the additional 400 members being allocated to the Defence Forces, the additional €100 million for defence and the extension of the naval tax credit, which are all excellent. However, spending money on an organisation that is faltering is folly unless the Government first fixes the underlying problems. In need of immediate action is the area of pay. The pay of members of the Defence Forces has not been fixed, contrary to what is being spread out there at the moment. Pay has been bottom loaded. The pay of private soldiers has been increased on completion of their training. The pay of cadets and young officers has also been increased but the differentials have not been increased. For example, a private moving to the rank of corporal can expect about an extra €7 a week. The differentials should have been kept the whole way up to incentivise people to seek higher rank, which has not been done. That has resulted in highly qualified people walking out of the Defence Forces in whom we the taxpayers have invested heavily to give them the skills they have. They take those skills with them when they leave.

The second matter, which relates to the Minister of State's Department, although it first arose long before he entered it, is the post-2013 pension scheme. What a bloody disaster. A pension scheme was brought in that is simply not fit for purpose. Those responsible tried to apply a one-rule-fits-all approach. For people on accelerated pensions such as those in the front-line services of the Defence Forces, the Garda, the fire service and prison officers, the post-2013 pension scheme is an incentive to walk out the door. More than 1,000 gardaí have left in the past 12 months because there is no point in staying. Clearly, people are voting with their feet. In the area of defence, the working time directive has been messed around with for as long as I have been in this House, which is ten years. I do not see any positive moves in the context of bringing in the working time directive.

To return to the area of pay, specialist pay in the Defence Forces is of great concern. We are talking about bringing in 400 recruits over the next 12 months but our Defence Forces instructors are not paid sufficient money to encourage them to stay. The risk that we will lose instructors is great.

I wonder if successive Governments have been ideologically opposed to Ireland being a sovereign State. I wonder if the Government is aware of its duties with respect to national sovereignty. Does it know that its responsibility is to protect our citizens and our borders - land, sea and air? Within Government, is there even the slightest embarrassment when Ministers meet their peers abroad at a time when we have surrendered responsibility for our airspace to a NATO country while waffling on about neutrality and remain dependent on the generosity of EU states to monitor the Atlantic Ocean for us? To our shame, unlike neighbouring countries such as Norway, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal and Iceland, Ireland lacks primary military radar and quick reaction alert capabilities. The latter are crucial for effective air policing. We have a duty to protect the numerous undersea cables passing through our waters. We also have a duty to be able to monitor the high volume of transatlantic flights traversing Irish airspace. Recent arms shipments to Israel passing through our airspace accentuate the need to significantly safeguard our national air sovereignty.

When asked about our ability to police our airspace, the Tánaiste and Minister for Defence replied that this would not be feasible in an Irish context. So, it appears that despite our wealth, the Government is happy to freeload on the generosity of our neighbours. The Tánaiste is wrong. A retired brigadier general and a retired Air Corps lieutenant colonel pilot instructor have identified a solution to the monitoring and security of our area of the western European airspace. They explain that air policing, a peace-time capability, involves monitoring airspace, identifying aerial threats and intercepting and escorting rogue or unidentified aircraft out of Irish airspace. In the context of €14 billion coming from the Apple tax money, they say that to bridge our capability gap, Ireland must promptly develop a meaningful air policing capability.This would entail an estimated initial capital investment of €350 million for aircraft procurement, with an additional annual cost of €20 million for crewing and maintenance. It is not as huge a figure as people constantly talk about. It is quite an affordable figure. They recommend the procurement of the Korean FA-50 or the Swedish Saab Gripen as they are the most suitable aircraft. They are both advanced supersonic jets with training capabilities and can be converted to combat use, enabling high altitude and high-speed intercepts. Shannon Airport is proposed as the most operationally suitable location to station Irish intercept aircraft. Situated on Ireland's west coast, it aligns with the most probable approach paths for rogue or unidentified aircraft from the west and north west. They estimate that the air policing operation could potentially employ 200 Air Corps personnel who, with their families, would amount to a workforce of 1,000 people in the Shannon region. This would be in line with the Government policy on regional development and employment. As I speak, the Tánaiste has advised Irish citizens in Lebanon to leave immediately. Shamefully, our so-called sovereign nation does not have any aircraft to evacuate these citizens. No doubt we will freeload on any country willing to carry our people.

I will turn to cybersecurity, in which the Minister of State has a huge interest and has been extremely active and where Ireland can be a world leader. I have heard the Minister of State say so himself. To achieve this, the Government must provide €1 billion, ring-fenced over ten years, for cyber education and training. Clearly, with a €1.5 billion surplus in the National Training Fund, this should not be a problem. There is an urgent need to increase the levels of cyber awareness among our citizens, starting with the aged and the young. The Government must fully fund cyber awareness training programmes. Cyber training must be part of the curriculum in every school, starting at third class in national school and continuing to leaving certificate level. The further education and training sector, led by SOLAS and the Education and Training Boards Ireland, ETBI, must become the lead provider of cyber skills training and we must see 10,000 places filled urgently.

I note a statement today on the new search and rescue, SAR, contract and the additional allocation of €71 million. The contract is not offering value for money. It is not unlike the previous contract, which the suppliers boasted was delivering better returns than their contracts for offshore helicopter services in the UK. I know for a fact that while the contract was being negotiated, no Minister had oversight of it. How do I know that? It is because the two Ministers involved, the Minister for Transport, Deputy Eamon Ryan, and the then Minister of State in that Department, Deputy Hildegarde Naughton, wrote a joint letter to me stating they did not have first-hand sight of what was going on and they did not really know.

We saw from the fatal crash of Rescue 116 that rushing things is not a good idea. There was to be a start date of 1 November for the first SAR station to be built, but only today has the advertisement been published for SAR commanders to help to meet the contract. There is no way it will be ready on 1 November. We will have to follow that up in the next few days.

Shamefully, the Government excluded the Air Corps from providing any part of search and rescue services. It is beyond foolish to put all our SAR eggs in one basket. We saw the UK SAR service served with a strike notice that would have crippled it if the service were to have been shut down. I would like to see what would happen in the event of the SAR provider in this country going into administration or liquidation. What would happen if SAR crews were to go on strike or the AW-189 were grounded for technical reasons? While I commend the budget in general and it is good, my concern is the one gaping hole for a country that depends hugely on foreign direct investment: defence is still not taken seriously. We need to look at that very carefully. I appreciate the Minister of State's efforts on it and I would appreciate if he were to try to ring-fence money for cyber awareness and cyber training.