Defence Forces plan advertising campaign to inform new recruits

Your country needs you - but it wants brains as well as brawn.

A new advertising campaign for the Defence Forces, due for release early next year, will tell you all about it.

Details of what it's like to be in the Army now will be contained in the £2 million campaign appearing in cinemas, on television and radio, in the print media as well as on bill-boards from early next year. However, it is not going to be just a "recruiting campaign", insists spokesman Cmdt Kieran McDaid.

"It will be more a promotional campaign, to inform people about what we do," he said.

"It is many years since we had any similar promotional campaign and we considered it time for another. Soldiering has changed a lot in that time, it has become more modern, more sophisticated. The weaponry for instance is a lot more high-tech."

Cmdt McDaid said that given the increasingly complicated nature of the work, the Defence Forces wanted to bring in people "who are bright and well-educated".

"The recruiting aim of the campaign is to be able to say to people that there is a challenging, fulfilling career in the Defence Forces."

There are about 10,500 members across the Army, the Naval Service and the Air Corps. Personnel are leaving at a rate of about 70 a month.

Asked whether there were problems recruiting in an, until recently, booming economy, Cmdt McDaid agreed that "in a time of boom it's difficult for the Army", as the Army might not seem as glamorous.

The coveted contract to run the advertising campaign has been won by the agency Cawley Nea.