MIDDLE EAST: Difficulties attracting doctors and other professionals to the Defence Forces could be overcome by encouraging them to join the reserve force and sending them on missions overseas, Minister for Defence Willie O'Dea has said.
Legislative changes would need to be introduced to ensure any volunteer's full-time position in the workplace was open for them when their foreign tour of duty was over, Mr O'Dea said.
"We are in the process of developing a system at the moment. But a system would have to be worked out in advance to keep their jobs open. Otherwise how would you get people like well- paid architects and engineers to give up their jobs?"
Reservists could be serving overseas within two years, before the end of 2009 when the White Paper, the Defence Forces reforms programme, comes to an end, he said. Specialists such as chefs and trained drivers could also be included in the scheme.
Mr O'Dea made his comments during a visit to Irish troops yesterday at Camp Ida in southeastern Lebanon. Some 158 Irish troops form a joint battalion with 205 Finns in the 12,000-strong United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil). The Irish are providing security for Finnish teams that have been carrying out bomb disposal and reconstruction work in the region.
About 80 per cent of the Finnish deployment are engineers who have been specifically targeted by their full-time army for a one-year deployment in Lebanon because of their skill set. The only full-time Finnish officers in the region are senior personnel deployed to manage their part-time colleagues. The Irish and Finns have already begun clearing cluster bombs from an area just outside the village of Khiam, close to the Israeli border and Camp Ida.
The bombs were dropped by the Israelis in the last days of the war with Hizbullah last summer. Just over 110 have been found and detonated in the last three weeks.
Mr O'Dea suggested Ireland could learn from the Finns' targeted recruitment programme.
"Obviously the big advantage of the Finnish system is that they can specifically advertise for four JCB drivers, or three engineers and so on, depending on what their needs are. These people can actually apply for a job."
Finnish sources in Camp Ida said their army relied heavily on reservists because it could not afford to recruit young Finns and then send them to university to study engineering and other specialities. In Finland, if a reservist agrees to go abroad for a year his or her job must, by law, be offered to them on their return.
Mr O'Dea said the Defence Forces in recent years had experienced difficulties recruiting medical doctors. If trained doctors were willing to go away with the Defence Forces as reservists some of these difficulties might be overcome. Irish troops are due to withdraw from the UN mission in Liberia in May and their continued involvement in Lebanon is due to be reviewed in October, 12 months after their deployment.