Decline of Defence Forces 'becoming irreversible'

Conor King, General Secretary, Representative Association of Commissioned Officers.

The decline of the Defence Forces may be “becoming irreversible” if necessary steps are not taken, an Oireachtas committee is set to hear.

The Representative Association of Commissioned Officers (Raco) is expected to tell the Oireachtas Committee on Defence and Foreign Affairs today that various reviews have “touched on the root cause” of the malaise within the Defence Forces “without actually addressing it”.

Commandant Conor King, the general secretary of Raco, will tell the committee that the main issue at stake is staff levels and “the failure to adequately resource Defence in order to retain highly qualified and experienced personnel to maintain capability”.

Raco’s last appearance before the Defence Committee was in May 2019, at a time when it was “accepted fact that the Defence Forces was in a manning level crisis”, according to Cmmdt King.

He will say that the report of the Public Service Pay Commission had “ultimately proved to be a major disappointment”.

“The measures fell well short of what was required, and many still have not been implemented two years on by military and civil senior management, who continue to refuse to engage meaningfully with the representative associations,” he will say.

The subsequent perceived “deepening of the crisis” is “scarcely believable”, he is expected to say.

“With the organisation’s strength having fallen further still to its current low of approximately 8,500, with only around 8,200 of these deployable... we ask ourselves, have we reached the bottom yet?” Cmmdt King will say.

The only way in which the Defence Forces can become an ‘employer of choice’, he will say, is by “breaking relativities with other public bodies, most particularly in terms of wage structures.

He will suggest that the army’s High-Level Implementation Plan, which had been expected to be “the solution to this staffing crisis” was “unfortunately allowed to fail by Defence senior management, through a lack of institutional and political will to resource it”, a fact which Raco deems to be “unconscionable”.