MINISTER OF STATE with responsibility for Defence Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has said it is not “necessary” to cancel a public holiday to provide for increased defence spending.

In an article with the Irish Independent, Carroll MacNeill called for defence spending to be doubled to €3 billion “so we can defend ourselves”.

In the article, she wrote that Denmark last year “cancelled a public holiday that it had had since the 17th century”.

Carroll MacNeill added: “It was cancelled to raise €427 million so it could increase its defence spending more quickly. Denmark is not on the front line but it understands the danger.”

When asked on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland what public holiday she would scrap to finance the increased defence spending, Carroll MacNeill claimed that such a line of questioning was “utterly facetious” and that this was “just an example” of what other countries were doing.

Carroll MacNeill said cancelling a public holiday wasn’t “necessary” but gave this example from Denmark “to show the urgency and increased risks that other countries are experiencing and how they are choosing to react to it”.

“We are so much of an outlier on our defence spend; we don’t need to cancel public holidays to do this but we do need to have a general awareness that this is a necessary change that we need to make and that we need to make it more quickly.”

She added that defence spending is “a really serious part of the national conversation” and that increased spending would “come from general Government expenditure, like all budgetary increases would come from”.

Carroll MacNeill said there is a surplus and the Government should prioritise how this is spent.

“We can’t do that in a year,” said Carroll MacNeill.

“We are building this slowly to get to that figure, we have already increased our defence spend from €1.1 billion to €1.5 billion and we need to continue to expedite that increase to get to €3 billion.”

Carroll MacNeill also said there is also a need for increased recruitment to the Defence Forces.

“We have the funds to be able to recruit but what we want to do is tell people what an opportunity it is to be in the Defence Forces,” said Carroll MacNeill.

However, People Before Profit-Solidarity TD Mick Barry said there “needs more money to be spent on housing, not more money spent on guns and ammunition”.

“I would prefer to spend €1.5 billion on 5,000 new houses than I would to spend it on naval ships and combat aircraft,” said Barry.

“There is a housing crisis in this country, not a defence crisis. I think that Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has got her priorities all wrong here.”

Barry added that “Ireland should refuse to participate in the ‘New Cold War arms race’”.

He also called for a “referendum on keeping Ireland out of the race and out of military alliances”.