body armour.<\/a>\n <\/p>\nSome members of the committee questioned the assessment that the costs of Safe loans would be more expensive than commercial markets, while one member, Independent senator Gerard Craughwell, said it was \u201coutrageous\u201d Ireland was not availing of the scheme.<\/p>\n
He claimed that both the Department of Defence and the Defence Forces wanted to use the loan facility but that the Department of Public Expenditure vetoed it.<\/p>\n
Adopted last May, Safe provides a fund of \u20ac150bn, which the European Commission says provides \u201ccompetitively priced, long-maturity loans\u201d to member states requesting financial assistance for \u201curgent and large-scale\u201d defence procurement \u2014 with the low cost based on the EU\u2019s \u201cstrong credit rating\u201d.<\/p>\n
Some 20 EU member states have so far availed of Safe loans, including countries of similar size to Ireland, such as Portugal (\u20ac5.8bn), Slovakia (\u20ac2.3bn), Cyprus (\u20ac1.2bn), Czechia (\u20ac2bn), and Croatia (\u20ac1.7bn).<\/p>\n
Brian O\u2019Meara, head of international security and defence policy in the Department of Defence, said a decision was made not to apply as the loan rate in Safe was \u201cmore than Ireland could get on the open market\u201d and was therefore not efficient for the exchequer.<\/p>\n
Fine Gael TD for Carlow-Kilkenny Catherine Callaghan questioned this assessment, but Mr O\u2019Meara reiterated that the market rate \u201cwould be lower\u201d.<\/p>\n
Mr Craughwell, a former member of the Defence Forces, claimed he had heard that both the Defence Forces and the Department of Defence wanted to avail of the scheme but that the Department of Public Expenditure had \u201ckilled\u201d it.<\/p>\n
He said it was \u201coutrageous\u201d than Ireland didn\u2019t avail of it.<\/p>\n
Mr O\u2019Meara said Ireland was open to common procurement under the scheme, where the other member states could draw down money from Safe.<\/p>\n
Brendan Fitzgerald, assistant principal officer in the Department of Defence, said Ireland would consider joint procurement for body armour, which he said could \u201cspeed up\u201d the process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ireland is not availing of a low-interest, long-term EU defence loan facility because the country can get lower…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":97746,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13308,61,60,43],"class_list":["post-97745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-defence-forces","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}