It has come to my attention that the Department of Defence are to issue a medal in commemoration of 1916, but this medal will only be issued to serving members in this present year. This is being seen as a slight on members who have served down through the years some of whom had 30 , 40 or even more years service. Under the proposal which exists at the moment those with only a few weeks or months service will be entitled to this medal. I agree with former members of the defence forces who say that this is very unfair and should be addressed as a matter of urgency. I am calling on the Minister for Defence who is the Taoiseach Enda Kenny to ensure that this situation is rectified.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It has come to my attention that the Department of Defence are to issue a medal in commemoration of 1916, but this medal will only be issued to serving members…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1784","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1784"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1785,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions\/1785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelfitzmaurice.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}