Call to end Border allowance for soldiers

AN ALLOWANCE paid to soldiers on Border duty during the Troubles should be stopped as there is no longer any justification for it, the Comptroller and Auditor General has said.

The allowance was first brought into the Army in 1972 to compensate soldiers for the difficulties of a Border posting, which often involved long hours of duty.

The allowance is still being paid despite the peace process. Last year it cost the Defence Forces €5.38 million. It is worth €96.41 for enlisted personnel and €112.19 for officers per week.

In his report to the Public Accounts Committee, John Buckley said in 1996 more than 26,000 patrols, checkpoints and searches were carried out along the Border.

There had been none since 2002, yet personnel from Border units are still being paid the allowance for a period of up to three months while on a training course, and logistical personnel such as cooks, fitters and military police are also paid the allowance while on attachment to Border units.

Mr Buckley said changes being pursued by the Department of Defence needed to take account of taxpayers, and money should not be applied for services that are no longer required.

The department's secretary general Michael Howard said he fully agreed with Mr Buckley's assessment, but its phasing out would be a matter of negotiation between the department and the Army representative bodies.

"His report is a great assistance to management because it fortifies and vindicates the position we have had for a long time," Mr Howard commented.

He said a review of the allowance is included in the Defence Forces modernisation agenda, agreed in June 2007 with the representative associations under the Towards 2016 programme.

He stressed that the negotiations in relation to the Border duty allowance are not connected to the proposed closure of four Border barracks next year.

"It would not be good practice for management to simply act peremptorily when there is a lot of sensitivity about it [the closures]," he said. There had been a lot of success in negotiating through the system of arbitration, he added. "It takes more time than we might like, but we have to be fair to the association where very often we are looking for concessions too," he said. He defended the delay in phasing out the allowance.

"It is important that we don't read history backwards. While we can now look back to 2002 and see these years of peace, in 2002 looking forward, the situation was far more uncertain.

"We didn't wish to dismantle the security arrangements on the Border until we were entirely certain that the security system had normalised and stabilised. There was never a certain time when you could say it is definitely over, and we would have taken a cautious view in relation to that," he said.

Mr Buckley said he accepted that the allowance should be scrapped through negotiation.

"It is in the nature of pay and so on, that expectations build up that can only be phased out through the arbitration and conciliation process," he said.