Sinn Féin spokesperson on Foreign Affairs and Defence, Matt Carthy TD, has said that Budget 2025 marks ‘the moment Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael admitted they have no intention of rebuilding our Defence Forces’.

Teachta Carthy said:

“More members left the Defence Forces every year than joined during the term of this government.  Budget 2025 exposes that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael as as either unwilling or disinterested in addressing the recruitment and retention crisis.

“The Commission on the Defence Forces set out a need for an additional capital expenditure of €246.5 million each year over ten years in order to meet Level of Ambition 2.

“Last year, the Tánaiste pulled a stroke – cutting funding by €39 in one budget line and increasing it by the same in the next in order to mislead; this year’s legitimate though modest, increase of €39 million amounts to less than half of the €79 million allocated by Sinn Féin last week in our alternative budget.

“The Tánaiste has failed to allocate the capital funding needed in any of his budgets to date, and this week, farcically, repeated the annual joke that is his promise to recruit a net additional 400 new Defence Forces personnel.

“Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael in government will not deliver 400 additional personnel in 2025.

“References to recruitment and maintenance within the Budget will ring hollow to personnel who have watched the privatisation of naval service maintenance, ordinance training, and most recently recruitment itself.

“The single most important thing that can be done to address the retention and recruitment crisis is the application of the working time directive to the Defence Forces.  But this Budget makes no reference to the work that needs to be done to do so.

“Indeed, having missed every target set in terms of removing the blanket exclusion, the Tánaiste now appears content to allow the Department of Enterprise to de-prioritise the required legislation.

“Sinn Féin wants to build our Defence Forces to protect Irish neutrality and sovereignty; monitor and defend our skies and seas; and safeguard our people from modern threats, including Cyber and hybrid attacks. 

“That won’t happen without investment and clearly it won’t happen while Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are in government.”