Naval Service Dail Éireann — 2025-12-16 ============================================================ Helen McEntee (FG), Meath East There are quite a number of different competitions, recruitments and initiatives ongoing, including those specifically for women. They are not necessarily specific to the Naval Service, but it is important that we support and work with the Defence Forces in making sure they are reaching out, whether in our schools or in different industries or sectors, specifically to ensure that we have those specialist positions and that we are reaching out to the areas and the specialist teams where we could maybe identify new recruits. There are different competitions and initiatives happening. I refer, in particular, to the Naval Service-specific competitions at officer rank, including those for operations branch officers, marine engineering officers, electrical engineering officers, engine room artificers, hull artificers, electrical artificers, radar-radio technicians and chefs. A great deal of work has been done. I appreciate that we need to do more, but it is very welcome that the numbers are starting to increase. We need to make sure we continue to focus on increasing them and reaching over the target of 1,000 we have set ourselves. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-16/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:28+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-12-16