Naval Service
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-17
============================================================

Thomas Byrne (FF), Meath East

The Deputy asked specifically about the LÉ Gobnait . That ship is scheduled to enter service in the third quarter of this year. We acknowledge that it would have been preferable to have it in service much sooner. It is the case, however, that the readiness and capability of and the activities carried out by the Naval Service have increased substantially over the past year. Work in that regard is going to continue. The Government has acknowledged that we have come from a low base of capabilities and that some capabilities were allowed to fall into abeyance over a period. That is why the Report of the Commission on the Defence Forces was very important in terms of setting forth a plan for how we get from not having sufficient protection for our State and not having sufficient resources for our Defence Forces, to having what we need. We are working through that, and the implementation phase is ongoing.

---

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/2026-02-17/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:38+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-17