Helicopters leasing decision 'incredible'

THE DECISION to lease two helicopters at a cost of €2.5 million for Irish forces in Chad which were not licensed to carry any passengers, including military personnel, has been described as “incredible and incomprehensible”.

Fine Gael TD Bernard Allen, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, said he failed to understand how nobody in the Department of Defence had checked that the two Mi-8Ts, which were leased last year, were not licensed to carry passengers.

Seán Fleming (Fianna Fáil) said the episode showed a lack of commercial negotiating ability within the Civil Service. “Time after time, we’ve seen bad deals struck between the Irish public service and private commercial operators,” he said.

The 10-month contract is now the subject of an internal Department of Defence inquiry.

The two helicopters were leased because it was feared that Irish troops could be cut off during the rainy seasons, which made it impossible to travel by road or rail.

Department of Defence secretary general Michael Howard told the committee that the issue of its licence to fly passengers was a “very reasonable question”, but he could not answer that question until he received the internal audit report.

Mr Howard said the same type of helicopter had been used in previous Irish missions, including the one in Liberia, but they were approved military aircraft.

Because the Chad helicopters, leased from Air Partner Commercial Jets, a British company, were civilian aircraft, their seat configuration was deemed not to be within EU regulations. The mission in Chad is EU-led.

However, the two helicopters have been able to carry cargo and are licensed for emergency medical evacuations, Mr Howard added. He said lessons would have to be learned from the process.

“This is the first time that we have procured helicopters commercially for operational use,” he said. “I would put my hands up completely and say that sometimes with something like this, you learn by doing it.”

Mr Howard said the closure of four Border barracks, as announced in the Budget, would benefit the training of Army personnel by concentrating more staff in fewer barracks.

He said the biggest criticism of the Defence Forces in a report carried out by PricewaterhouseCoopers in the mid-1990s was the failure of collective training standards because military personnel were dispersed over too many locations.

PricewaterhouseCoopers had recommended that the number of barracks be halved from 34 to 17.

“The benefit from our point of view, leaving everything else aside, is that by bringing personnel together we will improve the training standards and we will improve the deployability of the Defence Forces,” he said.

Mr Howard also disclosed that 16,798 personnel had taken Army deafness claims since soldiers first started suing for compensation in the 1990s. Of these, almost 16,000 claims had been finalised at a cost of €287 million, which included legal costs of €100 million. He said the outstanding claims amounted to about €8 million. “We regard this as an issue that is largely resolved,” he said.