Irish Examiner View: Our naval crisis likely to worsen

Irish Naval Service vessels berthed at Kennedy Quay Cork City. The LÉ Samuel Beckett is in foreground. Picture: Larry Cummins

The crisis facing Ireland’s naval service has been detailed extensively here in recent months, and the latest development marks another disappointing milestone in that saga.

As revealed by Sean O’Riordan, the service has been forced to place two more of its ships on ‘operational reserve’ due to its staffing crisis. In real terms this means the navy has been left with just two vessels, the LÉ Samuel Beckett and the LÉ William Butler Yeats, to patrol our exclusive economic zone, which amounts to 437,500 sq m in area.

This vast zone clearly needs far more ships if it is to be patrolled adequately and our security is to be maintained. The challenge of doing so is difficult enough given the particular difficulties of such a long coastline before one takes particular threats into account.

For instance, earlier this year ex-Garda Commissioner Michael O’Sullivan pointed out that international drug cartels would note the lack of patrols in Irish waters when considering routes to use to import drugs from South America into Europe.

Last September, MEP Billy Kelleher raised concerns about the security of fibre-optic cables on the Atlantic floor near the Irish coast: Kelleher was speaking in the context of the Nord Stream cables in the Baltic Sea being cut and of Russian naval exercises conducted in Irish territorial waters.

In addition, two years ago, Ireland needed the aid of the European Fisheries Control Agency in patrolling Irish waters because the naval service could not commit to increase its patrol days at sea.

One of the biggest challenges facing the service is the collapse in recruitment: Only 15 people completed their naval training last year, which is not nearly enough to fill the gap left by the departure of hundreds of personnel to either mandatory retirement or better pay and conditions in the private sector.

If the Department of Defence cannot address the issue of pay and conditions in particular, then this crisis is likely to get even worse. 

Decisive action is needed to make the naval service a more attractive proposition, as chances cannot be taken with the security challenges noted above.