The approach to this Estimate has, I think, changed somewhat over the 10 years or more that I have been in this House. We have seen the post-war developments in regard to Defence here, but there are some basic factors which remain and I should like to say a few words about them. Roughly, they come under two heads. One is the question of the Defence Forces themselves. Do we need them at all? Are they warranted, and what is the best way to have them? The second, of course, is the question of civil defence. I would prefer to take the latter question first, for the simple reason that two things have shown up since the last war.
One is that now more than ever if there comes a war, a war on a big scale, its consequences and even its immediate repercussions are likely to reach very rapidly practically every member of any community in the sphere of action. Under those circumstances you have the further consideration that the damage, the devastation that can be easily done to the civilian and productive populations that maintain the fighting Forces, is likely to be much greater than in the last two wars. In other words, the potential of any power against the civilian and productive element of an enemy is very much greater nowadays than it was, say, at the commencement of the First World War or even the Second World War. For that reason, therefore, as has been remarked in similar terms frequently, the ordinary citizen is in the front line.
There are pointers that show that we in this country cannot afford to neglect the problem of civil defence. The problem of civil defence is basically a problem of organisation. It is not a problem of big, expensive counter-weapons, at least so far as we are concerned. It is largely a problem of organisation in the first case, and thereafter there will be, and must be undoubtedly, expenditure of, shall I say, largely an engineering nature, to provide the facilities necessary to make the civil defence scheme work. That I think is one of the most critical things contained in this Estimate and we are now afforded the opportunity of discussing it.
I am glad that the Minister has adverted to the matter for other Deputies and I are perturbed that there is so little thought given by the people generally to the necessity for civil defence. It would be wrong to be alarmist about the matter, or to panic off with measures in any particular direction. In fact, that type of panic would be a complete negation of the organisation that is involved if you are to have an effective civil defence. It is a question of cool thinking and calculation and the provision of properly organised machinery. Although that must be so, we must not blind ourselves to the fact that 14 or 15 years have now passed since the last war; that there were only 20 years between the last two wars, from the end of 1918 to 1939; that there have been a number of scares in the interim, and a considerable amount of tension at times, and that at the present moment the world is not without its tension, to state the position very mildly indeed.
We are going through a time when, in spite of all the talk and efforts to maintain peace—which rather reminds one of the type of talk that we heard during the 1930's—the belligerent countries are intensely active with the development of weapons and the development of offensive armament, on the one hand, and with counter defensive measures on the other. Can we in this country afford completely to ignore these trends? I agree that it would be dangerous and undesirable for us to panic unnecessarily about the matter but on the other hand can we sit back and be completely complacent?
We know, for instance, that nuclear tests have been carried out in various parts of the world. I understand that nuclear tests were even carried out over the Atlantic and we are on the edge of the Atlantic. There were some scares recently—how well-founded they were I am not in a position to say—which indicated that there was a radio-active fall-out in certain western European areas. If that is so we have a defensive problem immediately—the possibility of such radio-active fall-out contaminating some area in Ireland. We shall probably have to consider such a possibility if this goes on and if reports of contamination from areas in this part of the world are confirmed. That in itself will necessitate some kind of monitoring and it seems to me that if we are to monitor our own area, to keep a watch for such things, it is actually a matter more for the Minister for Health than the Minister for Defence. From another point of view it is defensive in the broadest terms. If we are to do that we must co-ordinate with civil defence.
I make the point only to show that the time has come when we should pay some attention to this question of civil defence and emphasise again that in the first instance it is primarily a question of planning and organisation, in order to implement the plan so far as it is necessary to keep it effective, and potentially effective if you have a fall-out, and lastly to have provision for expansion to meet a major crisis.
What can be done in regard to that? Again, when we consider the nature of the problem, it is not altogether a question for a small group of technicians in the Department of Defence. It is quite clearly a question, in the first place, of staff and technical people in the Department of Defence to plan and to work out a scheme in the light of the best information available to them at the moment. They will probably have to revise that scheme in the light of changing information but when they have done that they must have the facilities for putting such a scheme into effect.
These facilities will require two things. They will require a certain amount of co-ordination and integration with other spheres of activity, technical and administrative, so as to ensure that a plan for civil defence, either generally or in a particular area, can be put into practice. It will require a certain amount of personnel and a certain expenditure to do that. Above all, because we cannot afford to maintain a large organisation on a whole-time basis for that purpose, it must of necessity mean a voluntary organisation tied in with the whole-time nucleus that is directing the activity. Then you come again on the problems of voluntary organisation which are to be met whether in the case of the F.C.A., the Red Cross, or an emergency fire-fighting and ambulance brigade, or anything else.
These are the problems that have to be faced here and I suggest to the House that a good deal of encouragement is needed. We have not adverted very much to this question of our civil defence organisation. The Minister stated in his opening speech that enrolment figures were most disappointing but, although that is so, I am gratified to find that enrolment is as high as it is. On that basis, it should be possible to build the organisation. One of the great difficulties is that there is not the same glamour about a civil defence organisation as there is about the traditional Defence Forces where the clank of weapons, the pomp of parade, compensate to some extent for anything else that is lacking. In the case of civil defence, it is hard slogging, done quietly, and frequently without any of the attractions that go with the other type of service.
Therefore, the Minister has a problem as to how to recruit for this organisation and how to foster it. I am not prepared at the moment to make any concrete suggestions on that point. It is an area of activity of which I have no direct experience, but I think we can agree the right approach is being made to the question of civil defence, that it is taking its place in a proper way in the activities and the programme of the Department of Defence. Let us hope it will receive adequate attention, that there will be proper planning and that the problem of getting personnel to work out that organisation will be overcome.
Apart from organisation, there is another aspect which ties up with the Defence Forces, that is, the question of technical advice and technical assistance. One of the great difficulties of a small country in relation to modern warfare or activity during modern war is the fact that the different activities in the community are interlinked. At the beginning of this century, at the time of the Boer War, the army of even a big Empire like Britain was equipped mainly with the rifle, which by that time had practically reached its modern perfection, that is, the ordinary rifle supported by artillery which by the standards of the first World War would have been extremely light. There were also a few experimental machine-guns.
In that situation, there were merely the problems of transporting and feeding troops and equipping them with these weapons. I admit there were big medical problems which were unsolved at that time but on the technical side, the main problems were those of transporting, feeding and clothing the troops and supplying arms and ammunition on that relatively simple scale. Of course, for a small country comparable with ours, the Boers were able to put up a very effective resistance because it was possible for them to have comparable armaments.
That situation changed markedly during the Great War of 1914-18. During that war, the pressures were such that the technical organisations behind the line came much more into the picture. There was, first of all, an increase in the number and types of weapons. There was the development of automatic weapons, the development of certain types of mortars and of the combatant aeroplane. Then there was the appearance of the submarine. All these things complicated the traditional soldiers' problems and introduced into war a technical aspect that had not been there to anything like the same degree before.
In those circumstances, there was an immediate tie-up with factory production. You could not separate armies from the civilian community or from the production factories. Even in the armies themselves, much to the disgust and against the resistance of the "old buffer" type of soldier, you had technical officers in the gas warfare service, in artillery and signals. Those technical officers, who were really engineers or scientists, were coming in and taking their place as a necessary element in the armed forces.
I have gone over that simply to illustrate a trend which was evident even in the first World War. You could not say: "There are your army units. Let them go off and fight and let us cheer them when they come home." By the end of that war, those units were tied up inseparably with the community that supported them, with the production facilities of that community and with the technical people behind them and even in their midst by that stage. By 1919, war had become very much the affair of the whole community and it was impossible to sort out the defence forces as one isolated element which could be treated as such.
Even in that war, too, you had the first signs of the civilian population, even in isolated countries like Britain, being involved at a distance from the actual zones of the conflict. You had, for instance, the first air raids on London. Although they were sporadic and very weak efforts compared with what the second World War brought, they were nevertheless an indication of things to come.
Therefore, the first World War ended with the problem facing the world that no longer could you regard defence as being catered for by providing an army, either big or small, and supplying arms. It had to be thought of in terms of factories, in terms of agricultural production and also in terms of the protection of the civil population against gas, against air raids, and so on. The last war proved that that point of view was the only one because all over the involved areas, whether in Europe or in Asia, the civilian populations were as closely associated with the military effort as were the soldiers in immediate contact with enemy troops.
It is a sobering thought to reflect that in Britain, between 1940 and 1944, the civilian and productive population was as much open to attack and was as much part of the offensive and defensive efforts of the British as were their troops in any other part of the country. The event is too recent for me to delay the House with details which I think most Deputies will remember, but the lesson is there that if it comes to a conflict, we cannot ignore the fact that it means involvement for everyone, and under the stress of conflict, a certain co-ordination of all the available resources of the country in relation to defence is inevitable, if we are to survive.
I hope the Ceann Comhairle and the House will pardon me going into these things at some length, but this is the one opportunity we have in the year and I think it is no harm that what I say should be said. I come now to our own experience in the last war. We entered the last war thinking we had made a certain amount of preparation. In fact, we had; but we all know that that preparation would have been totally inadequate had we been immediately and directly involved. We all know, too, that if we had been involved at a later stage, what we had achieved in 1940 would not have been adequate. From 1936 onwards, it became more or less accepted all over the world that all the talk and all the efforts in the interest of peace would not succeed and that there seemed to be an inevitable trend towards the holocaust that eventually came. From 1936 onwards, certain efforts were made here to provide for defence. These efforts briefly were to rehabilitate the Defence Forces at the time. There was also an effort at civil defence and the provision of anti-aircraft guns in the city of Dublin. There was preliminary work —good, quiet, unobtrusive work— done in a number of Departments in regard to the provision of materials and the sustenance of the civil population before that war. In any event, the thing came upon us in 1939 in a situation of relative unpreparedness.
I shall deal with the question of mobilisation later. As I pointed out here ten years ago, it was a great fortune that we were spared any immediate pressure in September of 1939. But in regard to civil preparations, it was possible, because of the time available then, to mobilise our food resources and industrial resources so as to get by in a neutral position. But nevertheless there were problems, problems which brought about, for instance, the hurried setting-up of the Emergency Research Bureau in 1940 or early 1941 and the hurried organisation of certain medical services or potential medical services in case of need and so forth. These things were all done in a time of crisis. They were done inadequately; but they were done at all merely because the time was available, and we got through. I think it is to a certain extent tempting Providence just to leave things in the same hope again.
To get back—I know I have wandered—to the essential point I was making about planning, we cannot regard this problem of defence in watertight compartments. We cannot think in terms of, say, the Army, F.C.A., the Reserve—what we would call the Defence Forces—in one compartment, Civil Defence in another and normal life in another, even breaking it up into such large categories. It seems to me that the Department of Defence at this stage— and later we shall have to support them with the facilities for carrying out the programme—must consider all the activities of the community with a view to civil defence primarily, because naturally we will all agree that an aggressive form of defence is something out of the realms of practicability for us. Therefore, it is civil defence in the first instance, with our military defensive arrangements alongside as part of the general scheme of national defence.
Taking that approach to it, there are a couple of specific things I want to suggest to the Minister. In my opinion, there is no use in having a competent group planning in vacuo. I know they are competent and before the last war they were competent. I have tried to pay my tribute to that elsewhere from my own experience of what the permanent staff did before the war. There is no use, either, in their merely focussing their attention on civil defence in the sense of providing shelters, training personnel to deal with casualties or to evacuate casualties from an immediate zone—all very essential things. There is no use thinking merely on that alone and in other Departments thinking of the armed forces and how they are to be deployed, whether for local protection or to resist enemy action on a big scale initially. What has to be thought out is that it will be tied in with our other normal activities.
Therefore, I see the problem this way. It is an essential part of defence first of all to see broadly what kind of plans you can provide for your population and how you are to cope with the threat you forsee. Of course, that means some definite estimate of the situation: what do you foresee? Some estimate will have to be made as to the likely situation or the alternative likely situations. Having made that estimate, you have to ask; what do we do as a people to meet that? Will it be a question of wholesale radio-active fall-out, because there is much of that in the vicinity; will it be a question of a bomb in a particular place, a question of a parachute invasion, a question of being involved generally because there is action in the vicinity; or merely a case of trying to get by with the storm around you, as we did on the last occasion? Whatever it is, it is a problem for the whole community and an estimate has to be made.
We have to ask ourselves what we will do. It seems to me, without being dogmatic in the absence of information that would help me to form a firm opinion, that you have, first of all, the question of how you will feed your population, how you will maintain the supply of food to your population in the scheme you envisage. For instance, if you envisage that you will have evacuation arrangements in certain areas, then you have to work out how you will provide for the feeding problem that goes with that. I mention food simply because it seems to me that we all agree that it is a first essential.
Equally essential is the question of transport. Any movement to give effect to organisational arrangements involves transport. I remember in the last war, when we were considering the question of civil defence for Dublin city, there was the problem of evacuation. That meant a problem of transport. It meant a dovetailing and co-ordination with the requirements for the moving of troops and the scheme of defence in existence. I mention all these things to show how these problems are interwoven. The real point I want to make is this: There has to be provision for feeding the population and co-ordination with food production in the country.
Next there has to be provision for transport. Therefore there has to be co-ordination of our transport system. There will be the necessity for certain goods and equipment that you may have to produce here, essential goods and equipment to make up for what you cannot get in. That means a complete survey of our industrial resources, and there will be technical problems as well.
That brings me back to the question of the Emergency Scientific Research Bureau. As an example, I shall quote one instance of what actually happened. During the last war, a certain industry went short of certain essential chemicals and they requested the bureau to produce these chemicals. The bureau at first felt that it would not be capable of doing that. It so happened that the Army required these same chemicals and by combining the resources of the Army with the technical research and skill of the bureau, these chemicals were actually produced and were available to the Army and the industry that needed them. That is clearly indicative of the sort of thing I am thinking of, although the Emergency Scientific Research Bureau was limited in its potentialities by reason of its late start and because it had to rely on whatever facilities were available in the middle of 1941, which was then too late.
It is the function of the Defence staffs here to co-ordinate all these aspects I have mentioned into one scheme and then to be ready to face the second stage, which is the preliminary implementation stage. It is quite out of the question, of course, that the Department of Defence will be able to maintain such institutions, that they will be able to maintain a large number of technicians and scientists, experts on transport and food production and all these things, just waiting for whatever is to happen. That is not in the realm of practical politics. It therefore seems to me that some linkup is necessary with these agencies whose normal business it is to engage in these activities I have mentioned.
It should be possible for the Minister for Defence and the Government, perhaps with some other Departments, to secure the necessary liaison to enable the food problem to be placed in the stage of having something definite ready. It should be possible for the Department of Industry and Commerce and certain individual firms to provide against certain problems that can be foreseen. We have a very elaborate transport organisation in this country, one which has been a problem. However, the fact that you have here an organised transport system in Córas Iompair Eireann seems to indicate that it should be possible for the Department of Defence to co-ordinate a scheme for the purpose I have mentioned. All that will require staff, both civil and military, in the Department of Defence.
You then have the more difficult problem of technical advisers. It is not quite easy to see how you can deal with that problem. During the last war, you had in the Defence Forces a number of officers who came in temporarily and who had the necessary technical qualifications and experience. We had a number of engineers—the Minister himself was one—and you had others who came into the Army and whose technical knowledge was available to the Army.
Naturally, such people cannot be kept in peace time, but I suggest to the Minister that a technical reserve of some sort should be seriously considered. I know that it might be considered wasteful but unless something like that is done, there will be a deficiency of technical personnel when the time comes. Worse than that, the postponement of the mobilisation of that type of personnel to the last moment means that they will not have experience of the problems they are to face. If you had such a reserve organisation of scientists, engineers and doctors, they could be brought sufficiently into the picture so that when the occasion arose, they would be able to fit into the scheme right from the start. That is very desirable. If you wait until the last moment, you have to make allowance for the time factor involved in educating such personnel in the military side of affairs.
I think that during the last war, at a certain stage, there were a number of surgeons and doctors who were actually taken in and provision was made for the maintenance of hospitals in case of necessity. I doubt if any of them ever wore uniform, even though they were given their commissions and I would suggest the adoption of some such scheme covering the type of people I have mentioned, chemists, physicists and biologists. Bacteriological warfare is not beyond the realms of possibility and the fact that it is so little talked about makes me somewhat nervous. We would need bacteriologists, chemists, physicists and practically every type of scientist. Doctors, engineers and such people will all be needed to play an essential rôle in civil and general defence, if we should have to call on them.
It will be too late to leave their mobilisation to the last minute and some thought should be given to the provision of some such kind of organisation. I do not know how it can be done but a solution of the problem is most essential. I also think that the Defence Forces would never be able to supply that organisation completely from within themselves. As far as the Army is concerned, they are technicians of another sort. They are as much technicians and technical people in their own particular sphere as, say, a physicist or a chemist or an engineer is in his. They are wanted for that. On the civil side, the administration and organisation of these things in their own way can be regarded as essential technical skills, too. Therefore, there is still a gap.
When I get that far, I come to the question of the Reserve generally. I want to repeat something which I tried to emphasise to previous Ministers as far back as ten years ago, from the experience we had during the war, and that is the necessity, in the first place, for a particular cadre or regular force. You cannot do anything unless you have the nucleus and, more or less, that nucleus has been maintained or provided. After that, you must have a Reserve to tie in with that nucleus. For that reason, I welcome what the Minister said about integrating the F.C.A., the First Line Reserve, and the permanent forces into one scheme. I never could see very much reason why there should be any clear-cut distinctions. It was in its nature to be one scheme although there were historical things that tended to separate things. That is welcome. The only thing I fear about it is that it is an indication of our failure to maintain a First Line Reserve.
I welcome and I think it is completely right that the F.C.A. should be integrated with the Defence Forces and treated as full soldiers, as they undoubtedly are and can be made, and that they should be placed in their proper place in the scheme as full soldiers. I completely agree with that. As a member of the organisation that was their predecessor before the War, the Volunteer Force, we fought for the same thing and, in the event of the mobilisations afterwards, it proved we were justified.
I completely agree with the Minister there but I fear it is now an indication that we have completely failed in ten years to maintain an adequate First Line Reserve—in other words, that the First Line Reserve that was there at the end of the war dwindled away. That is what I fear. To that extent I am sorry.
On the other hand, one has to face the fact that 15 years is 15 years, that that Reserve would have gone and that we never faced up to a provision for a First Line Reserve in the regard in which we discussed it previously. As far as men and N.C.O.s are concerned, there was a really serious problem there. It was difficult to get men for the intake. I can understand that. But I still feel we were negligent on the question of providing continuity for a Reserve Officer of a certain type, as well as the F.C.A. However, that is by the way.
The lesson I want to recall is simply that it will be on the F.C.A. that we shall have to depend if it comes to mobilisation for our organisation to work at all. If it comes to a question of mobilising our resources for general defence, civil defence or military defence, the F.C.A. will have to play an essential role and a pivoting role. What will happen will be what happened before. Those in the F.C.A. will be needed immediately to be absorbed in the regular forces and to provide the framework on which the voluntary or compulsory influx, as the case may be, will come at that time to be built, just as in 1939 and 1940. I think the Minster, therefore, is right in his attitude there and that the F.C.A. must be fostered. I am sorry, however, that some of the experienced officers, particularly, and the men who were there in 1940—some of whom would still be young enough— are not kept.
In that regard, I would mention the question of lieutenants of the Reserve who went out at the age of 47, I think. In my view, it would have been well worth while to keep on these older officers. Admittedly, officers over 40 years of age may be past the ditch-jumping stage. They may not be as slick going around a corner with a rifle or a platoon of men as a youngster but they are not wanted for that now; they are wanted for their invaluable experience. They can play a very fine and important rôle at a time of mobilisation or integration of the forces, and after, on the administrative side. They are old and experienced enough to work in the team and make it work. They are old and experienced enough not to want, like young fellows, to be off with weapons all the time but to sit in an orderly room and do the administrative work, quartermaster work, and so on. That is not glamorous work, which is what young people like, but it is more essential perhaps than the more glamorous work of the ordinary military exercises whether in reality or in preparation. I think every effort should be made to keep these older officers. For that purpose, I would again recall our experience of 1939-40. It is indeed very instructive.
The pre-war Army was based on the Army which was demobilised after the Civil War, in 1925. It had an excellent quota, within itself, of officers with actual experience of actions in some form or another. I think that even we on this side of the House, who would have taken very different views in those days, must pay a tribute to the discipline and organisation of that Army in the period from 1925 to 1939.
When I first made the acquaintance of the Army on the same side of the ditch in 1932 or 1933, the thing one was impressed by was that, whatever one said about it, discipline and administation were excellent. You had a corps of Irish N.C.O.s second to none. I doubt if any Army will ever again see the corps of N.C.O.s that the Irish Army had prior to 1939.
It was my own great privilege in Portobello Barracks in the period 1939 to Easter, 1940, to have in a company a picked bunch of these N.C.O.s. I am prepared to say anywhere that a finer body of men was not to be found for efficiency, discipline, administrative ability and, I should say, combatant ability too. They were the backbone of the Army. The standard of the regular officers also was high.
In the 1930's, we had an Army here whose officers and N.C.O.s and men were of a very high standard, extremely well-disciplined and ordered and, therefore, reliable. The result is that we had a very strong nucleus upon which to expand even though their numbers were absolutely and totally inadequate. I have gone over that before. It is enough to point it out.
The next thing I want to point out is that, grafted on to that Army, you had an "A" reserve of officers and men who were not very far behind them in quality. The mere fact that they turned up and remained in association with them for one full month every year and that that discipline and administration were there indicates that you had a group of officers and men, at least as far as discipline and administration are concerned, of a very high quality—the men, particularly. Again, the N.C.O.s and men were good soldier material. That was the "A" reserve.
That "A" Reserve, because of the length of time they were in training every year, the smallness of the Army and the fact that their training every year simply involved routine work and administrative duties, meant that you had some thousands—I forget the figures but I gave them here on another occasion and they are on the records of this House—of a Reserve ready. You had that Reserve immediately ready to join the regular Army—all of them with plenty of experience and even competent experience. Therefore, you could count on a bigger cadre than you had. That was the position.
You had the B reserve, which was something similar. On top of that, there was what started as the equivalent of the F.C.A., the Volunteer Force. There you had a magnificent body of boys and officers which supplied its quota of officers and N.C.O.s and by 1940 there were about 20,000. I forget the exact figure as I have not seen the records for a long time, but it is safe to say that it was a considerable body of officers and N.C.O.s, with a good degree of training but with no real administrative or integrated experience. They had potential ability. They were from a very wide sphere. They had a good deal of training, a good deal of enthusiasm and efficiency, but they were lacking in the knowledge of routine military life, as was natural, since we only did a couple of weeks whole time training every year. The rest was part time, like the F.C.A.
That leads me to this point: We had mobilisation in 1939. What happened? It was a very chaotic business. The A Reserve and the regular Army integrated. If it had not been for the A Reserve, we could not have carried on with the guards and all that kind of thing that had to be catered for. The volunteer force took time to integrate. On mobilisation the Volunteer Force units, that is, what would be the F.C.A., were not immediately ready for full military duties. It did require some time to integrate them. Therefore, it was back on the old A Reserve largely supplemented by Volunteer personnel, and the regular Army to fill that gap which was only inadequately and barely filled, and that at a time when we were fortunately spared any further great pressures.
When it came to the mobilisation of 1940, which was on a much bigger scale, we had to face the problem of taking in wholesale the volunteers all over the country who came to the Colours in the emergency. In a few cases, they were men with experience. They were immediately absorbed. Mostly they were young men, willing to do anything for their country, but inexperienced and untrained, who had to be taken into the military organisation. It was at that phase that the Volunteer Force proved absolutely essential. In the first mobilisation, if it had not been for the availability of the officers, N.C.O.s and men of the old Reserve, we would have not got by. If it had not been for the volunteer officers who were ready and of the proper age group, taking their place in combatant units, volunteer N.C.O.s and volunteer men already trained and in service for some nine months, already brought to the stage where they could form the basis of that mobilisation, that mobilisation could not have got by, either. That is a fair statement and a fair judgment of all of us who have tried to examine the record in retrospect.
That brings me to this point: Granting that we shall have a pattern giving one time to mobilise defence forces, I am worried about the administrative posts and the administrative problems of mobilisation and expansion of the Defence Forces that may be needed. The older Reserve officers, particularly, and reserve N.C.O.s can be an invaluable resource there. I should like to say to the Minister that every effort should be made to get that kind of man and to hold him. He will not be the type you will want for immediate combatant duty, but he will be the man who will function in the stores, in the orderly room, in administration generally and he will also supply—and this is most important—a steady type of officer or N.C.O. for certain essential types of guard duty.
There is a type of guard duty that is essential in times of crisis and a type of guard duty that calls for a great deal of steadiness. These men, with their experience of past mobilisation, their maturity, can fill a very useful rôle there. I am pleading with the Minister now for a reconsideration of these men who are, say, under 55. Anyone under 55 is useful in this category. I say that deliberately. A man, physically fit, under 55, can be, useful in this category. I would suggest to the Minister that an effort should be made to hold any of the old personnel who already had service during the emergency or even after it, who are of the necessary quality, and that effort will be well worth while. They will not last forever and, therefore, there should be a constant watch kept as to how the rôle they would be called upon to play can be filled, whether it is from Regular officers who retire as time goes on or not.
In regard to the F.C.A., the only thing is to do what the Minister is doing and treat them as soldiers, rely on them as soldiers and try to give them the facilities to be as well trained as they can be to fit in with a scheme of mobilisation.
I have delayed the House quite long enough. In summary, I repeat that civil defence is an essential thing and should be carefully considered but it means coordination, not only with the Defence Forces but with fire brigades and such units. It is a national problem and should be approached on that basis and we should all co-operate with the Minister in that regard. In regard to the Defence Forces, I have made that plea for the old Reserve. Do not let them go and, by all means, let us build up the new Reserve as rapidly as we can.
