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GARDA HELICOPTER OPERATIONS have been affected due to the crisis in military Air Traffic Control, the Chief of Staff of the Irish Defence Forces has said.
Lieutenant General Rossa Mulcahy made the comment during a hearing of the Defence Committee this evening – he was responding to a question from Dublin TD Tom Brabazon.
As The Journal revealed last month, the service has been forced to move to a part-time five-day-week and daylight-only service because it does not have enough air traffic controllers.
New measures are being assessed which will allow enable the Air Corps to return to a full-time seven day and nighttime service, an Oireachtas committee is to be told today.
As of this morning, the service remains on the restricted hours with aircraft only operating Monday to Friday and during daylight hours.
The Garda Air Support Unit (GASU) helicopter is owned by An Garda Síochána with Air Corps pilots – it is based at Casement Aerodrome in Baldonnel, Co Dublin.
Mulcahy said that the Air Corps has been liaising with the garda authorities to deal with the problem.
“Yes, there has been an impact. We have restricted our level of hours of operation in Baldonnel.
“I don’t [want to go into] specifics for operational reasons, but we have put a number of mitigating measures in place, in close cooperation between Air Corps headquarters and garda headquarters at that level.
“So when the service isn’t available, at the moment, the GASU unit operates from a different location, but we do have plans in place in the immediate future to extend the hours of operational as well,” he said.
At this evening’s meeting, Jacqui McCrum, the Secretary General of the Department of Defence said they did not alert the Defence Minister when they received a 2021 report warning of an impending crisis in air traffic control because it believed it was not necessary at that time.
An internal 2021 report had recommended introducing a retention payment scheme to retain the high skilled specialists. The report also said that a shortfall in ATC services in the Air Corps would happen periodically as personnel are attracted to high paid civilian jobs.
Tánaiste Simon Harris, who is Minister for Defence, announced earlier this month that the Cabinet had agreed to offer a new payment scheme for the controllers to keep them in service in line with the retention proposal outlined in the 2021 report.
Jacqui McCrum, Secretary General of the Department made the comment during a Defence Committee when she was being questioned by Senator Gerard Craughwell.
Craughwell repeatedly asked McCrum if she had alerted the Minister about the crisis when she received the 2021 report.
The civil service official responded: “The 2021 Report would have been completed and it wasn’t sent for submission to the Minister, because there wasn’t a crisis at that time. Since 2021 there was an increase in numbers, and we had 24/7 supplied a service from then up until the second of June this year.”
The Secretary General had said during the hearing that a private company had head hunted Air Corps traffic controllers with an “open cheque book” but that that the State was now making offers of a special payment to the personnel to stay in the Air Corps.
Brigadier General Rory O’Connor, who is the head of the Air Corps, explained the current environment for air traffic control and said there is a shortage of controllers across the globe.
“It is a very skilled profession, there’s always going to be a high demand. It’s natural, if you look around the world, that as a small island, we feed into bigger areas, whether it’s Europe or into the Middle East, and you will always move, I suppose where the money is.
“Given the nature of the job, you can’t just switch on in terms of turning people into air traffic controllers. Everything has to be safety managed, in relation to that, you have to develop, have to train, and depending on where you’re operating, there are specific endorsements then required also,” he added.
O’Connor said there was no “easy solution” to the current crisis but said that development for the future of the Air Corps as an Air Force was continuing.
“That’s going to be the priority for us in terms of developing capabilities, to ensure that the defence of Ireland, because, as everyone’s well aware, the world has changed in the past couple of years, and that’s the priority piece,” he added.
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