Defence Matters: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-25 ============================================================ Diarmuid Wilson (FF), Administrative Panel I welcome the Minister back to the House. This is her second time here in three weeks, which is a great start. That is more time in the Seanad than some of her predecessors spent in an entire session of this House. She is very welcome. She has definitely hit the ground running and I congratulate her on that. Like Senators Kyne and Craughwell and other colleagues, I was delighted to be in Galway two weeks ago to witness the presentation by the Minister and the Chief of Staff of distinguished service medals to Fr. Paul Murphy and three members of Óglaigh na hÉireann, Private Dylan Geraghty, Corporal Daniel Padden and Private Ciara Shanahan. It was a great occasion. These three young soldiers came to the aid of the chaplain when he was under attack in Galway barracks two years ago. It was great to see them recognised, acknowledge and rewarded for their actions. I was glad to meet the chief chaplain of the Defence Forces who happens to be a former school mate of mine, Fr. Paschal Hanrahan. I had not met him in many, many years and I was delighted to meet him there. It is one aspect of the excellent work our Defence Forces do. I welcome the publication of the national maritime security strategy this morning. I welcome the fact the French Government will work along with the Irish Government in developing the protection of our seas in the economic zone and our undersea cables. I have a question on the undersea cables that the Minister probably will not be able to answer today. Has any attempt been made to negotiate with the various private entities who actually own the undersea cables that pass through our waters to make a contribution towards their protection? I understand the technology is out there but it is very expensive. It is incumbent upon them to pay some contribution towards the protection of those cables. That is not taking away from our responsibility to protect our own national and economic waters. I will concentrate on the recruitment and retention policy of the Defence Forces. My colleague, Senator Gallagher, will deal with other matters. I welcome the fact that there was a net increase of 200 in the numbers of people serving in our Defence Forces. However, we have a long way to go. My understanding is that our strength at present should be 9,500 and the actual numbers are 7,700. We have made a commitment that there will be 8,000 members of the Defence Forces by the end of this year. Is that going to happen? There is a commitment under level of ambition, LOA, 2 to have 11,500 personnel in uniform as members of the Defence Forces by 2028. It is now time for us to recognise the fact that we are not going to achieve that. Like the Minister, I would very much hope we would but we are not going to achieve that number and we should be realistic about it. I understand that our capability is to train in the region of 900 to 1,000 recruits per year. We need to increase that dramatically if we are to achieve our goal of 11,500. --- 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/seanad/2026-02-25/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:41+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-25