Depleted Defence Forces need expertise
That is according to most senior official in the Department of Defence who says he and his colleagues are working on a number of measures to bolster numbers in the Army, Naval Service, and Air Corps, which have fallen to what are now critically low levels.
Almost 3,000 highly-experience personnel have resigned from the three arms of the Defence Forces in the past few years, leaving them seriously depleted of expertise in several sections, especially those which would have to prevent or react to a terrorist attack against this country.
Department secretary general Maurice Quinn admitted to an Oireachtas committee that there had been “a bleed of Air Corps pilots over a long period of time” and that highly-trained air traffic controllers had also been poached by the private sector.
He said a strong case was being made to the Public Service Pay Commission to increase wages in an effort to make the Air Corps more attractive and that the department was looking at a package which might entice pilots who had flown to the private sector to return.
“We have been asked to find a way to bring them back because of their skills and experience,” he said. “The other avenue is direct entry [of trained pilots working in airlines].”
On two previous occasions, pilots were given financial incentives to entice them away from jobs in major airlines and it is possible that the Government will reintroduce them to stem the exodus.
Mr Quinn added that his department was “looking at everything we can to keep and recruit pilots”.
He made his comments in the wake of the exclusive leaking of a damning to the Irish Examiner compiled by University of Limerick academics, which found that cutbacks in the Defence Forces in recent years have left them almost dysfunctional. Mr Quinn admitted that turnover in military forces was “universally higher than is the norm in the public service”.
He added that enough people are applying for recruitment drives, but failing all the time, and the department’s own statistics showed that one-fifth of those inducted were dropping out “during initial training”.
Plans are also being put in place to promote enlisted men and women to the officer corps, to plug gaps in expertise lost in the Army’s higher ranks, in engineering and bomb disposal, and with officer engineers in the Naval Service.
Meanwhile, despite a well-published campaign two years ago to attract more women into the forces, Mr Quinn admitted it had not had the desired effect.
He said the number of women in the DF was at around 6% and there was a need to increase that.
Mr Quinn said that the British were ahead percentage-wise and that he and his colleagues had recently held a meeting with their British counterparts to see what ideas they could use to get more women to sign up.
The department’s secretary general said he hopes that visits to schools by Defence Force personnel last year, to commemorate the 1916 Rising, will engender a career serving the military among the upcoming generation. The exodus of highly-trained personnel will be a major talking point when RACO, which represents DF officers, holds its biennial conference next week in Naas.
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