In 2001 retired Army captain Tom Clonan found himself in the spotlight when his PhD, “Women in Combat: the Status and Roles Assigned Female Personnel in the Permanent Defence Forces”, came to the attention of the media. It outlined incidents of discrimination, bullying, sexual harassment and sexual assault perpetrated on female members of the Irish Defence Forces. Of the 60 members of the Defence Forces he interviewed, 59 had experienced some combination of the four. One in five had experienced sexual assault. There were attempts to discredit Clonan and his research and he found himself ostracised by his former colleagues. It was, in the words of John Devitt of Transparency International, “textbook whistleblower reprisal”.
A subsequent study, initiated by then minister for defence Michael Smith and headed by Dr Eileen Doyle, vindicated Clonan with similarly stark findings and set out proposals for reforming the institution. In 2019 then chief of staff Mark Mellett requested a meeting with Clonan and later invited him to deliver an address to officers about his findings. That was, says Clonan, “hugely meaningful for me”.
To think 21 years later that all these young people in a foreseeable and preventable way could have been helped and that that didn't happen
Last month RTÉ broadcast Katie Hannon’s radio documentary, Women of Honour, in which former female military personnel outlined more recent episodes of bullying and abuse. Clonan, who was interviewed for the programme, was subsequently contacted by dozens of former soldiers who wished to discuss their experiences. Shortly afterwards he was also featured in TG4’s series on whistleblowers, Misneach. “To think 21 years later that all these young people in a foreseeable and preventable way could have been helped and that that didn’t happen,” he says. “I don’t know how I can process that.”
I meet Clonan at the TUD (Technological University Dublin) Grange Gorman campus where he lectures in the school of media. We take a circuitous route to a meeting room so we can pass people singing operettas and playing church organs in the music school. He says he never thought of himself as a whistleblower when he was doing his original research. “I was doing a PhD. We were confronted with an unanticipated set of outcomes. And I pursued that in the understanding that I had the support of my superiors. It wasn’t bravery.”
Joining the Army didn’t come from nowhere. Clonan’s father and grandfather were in the gardaí and his brother became a naval officer. But another influence was his maternal grandmother who was attached to the south Dublin brigade of the IRA during the War of Independence. “She was a multitasker, a schoolteacher by day and then an arsonist and a freedom fighter. She died when I was 10 in 1976 and she was a big influence on me.”
Clonan thinks he imbibed a notion of public service and serving the State from his family and after a degree in education in Trinity College and two years of primary teaching he entered the Cadet School in 1989. Forty-one of about 60 cadets made it through training the year he was commissioned. By then, he says, “I was completely and utterly immersed in the values of the organisation, in its culture, in the norms of behaviour, absolutely right down to my fingernails”.
He was assigned to an artillery unit. Every week was different. He trained in the Glen of Imaal. He provided armed support for gardaí operations. He was involved in security at Portlaoise prison. In 1995 he went with the 78th battalion’s UN peacekeeping mission to Lebanon. “That was one of the defining experiences of my life,” he says.
His time there coincided with Operation Grapes of Wrath when, in reprisal for Hezbollah rocket attacks, Israel bombarded south Lebanon and killed hundreds of men, women and children. Clonan was in the mobile reserve unit. It was their job to be “de facto human shields”. Before that offensive began, he says, “we’d go up to the villages and we’d stop the armoured vehicles and the guys would be giving [the kids] the chocolate from the ration pack . . . And then Grapes of Wrath started and we were going around assisting and providing armed support for the engineers in the Red Crescent taking the bodies out. I just found that very, very bleak . . . To see the killing of children. To me that was like the end of the world . . . There’s footage of me in the back of the armoured personnel carrier looking down at what used to be someone’s house, just a crater in the ground. And I was looking down at all [the] pieces of broken furniture, knives and forks, kids’ toys. It had a really profound impact on me. . . What I learned from all of that sh*t show was that violence begets violence.”
Later he remembers something about his time there. “I was in a place called Tiberias [in Israel] and I wanted to ring home and I went into a shop to buy a phone card. And the shopkeeper says, ‘Where are you from?’ I said from Ireland. He said, ‘You want to buy a phone card? They’re very expensive. You can use my phone at the back of the shop on one condition . . . Ring your mother . . . and tell her that you love her.”
Clonan’s voice cracks a little with emotion. “I noticed on the wall there was a picture of his son, uniformed, he was in the Golani Brigade and was killed. He put it all together in his head. He said, ‘This young fella, he’s like my young fella, who was away from home’ . . . So, ‘Ring your mother’.”
Women played a very active role in the liberation of the State and here were a bunch of men in the 1990s, many of whom had never heard a shot fired in anger, making up rules for women
He thinks his time overseas made him appreciate the difference between reality and the official narrative. “I was looking at the news and it was pictures of Israeli aircraft taking off [but] I really felt strongly that the story wasn’t being told, the reality of just how squalid it all was and how pointless it all was.”
Shortly after he returned he decided to pursue a PhD in Dublin City University (DCU). He had noticed during security briefings how many high-profile female terrorists there were compared to relatively few high-profile female army personnel. “They were equal opportunities organisations,” he says. “And there was my grandmother’s experience. Women played a very active role in the liberation of the State and here were a bunch of men in the 1990s, many of whom had never heard a shot fired in anger, making up rules for women.”
He repeatedly stresses how many of his superiors were aware of his research. He does so because one false narrative propagated later was that he had pursued the PhD without permission. He had permission. Without it he would have been unable to look at all the documents the Defence Forces had regarding female soldiers. He compared these to the policies of international military organisations as well as the Garda Síochána and RUC.
“The Defence Forces were completely out of step with the international military ... They had no equality mission statement. They had no equality officers... What the Army did have was a set of very comprehensive policies that applied to female personnel that were explicitly discriminatory ... They were also unlawful under international law, European law, Irish law and were contrary to the aspirations for Irish men and women as set out in the Constitution . . . You’d get private soldiers who were [documented] ‘riflemen’. And I’d contact the unit and I’d say, ‘These individuals, what’s their role?’ And they’d say, ‘Well, they’re working as waitresses in the officers mess’ . . . There was an almost pristine gender division of labour within the organisation.”
In 1998 DCU authorities concluded that in order to lodge the thesis to DCU’s library within the boundaries of the Official Secrets Act, he needed to get “a letter of comfort” from then chief of staff Gerry McMahon. McMahon was very interested in the research, says Clonan. “He wrote a letter for me to give to the registrar, which said [that] the Defence Forces have no objection to the work being examined or lodged to the library in the normal way for a PhD thesis.”
My dad, who's passed away a long time now, looked at me and said, I thought you knew what you were doing
Shortly afterwards Clonan started interviewing female personnel and the findings got darker still. His work had been focused on structural inequality in the organisation but now people were disclosing evidence of bullying, harassment and sexual harassment. “For many of them . . . it was the first time that anyone had ever sat down in a room with them and asked them about their experience in the Defence Forces . . . Of the 60 [interviewed], 59 reported experiences of discrimination, bullying, harassment, sexual harassment, sexual assault. One in five experienced sexual assault, which is very high.”
In November 2000 the thesis was lodged at the library. At that time a new chief of staff was about to start. “I wanted to present the findings of the research to him,” says Clonan. “I made a PowerPoint presentation. I sent it to my superiors in DF HQ. And the day I did that was the day that I began to feel the first reprisal phenomenon . . . I was told, ‘under no circumstances will we be showing any of this ‘crap’ to the chief of staff. This is bullsh*t. This is complete and total nonsense’.”
He now realises he was naive. He thought they would act on his findings. He was due to retire to take up a lecturing position at the Institute of Technology. He continued making attempts to contact the chief of staff. He still has the emails. In the summer of 2001 freelance journalist Declan Power was working on a story about a disclosure of rape at an FCA camp when someone told him about Clonan’s research. He contacted Clonan who told him it was available in the DCU library.
The story broke in the Sunday World. It was followed by detailed articles in The Irish Times and the Irish Independent. The chief of staff issued a press statement which Clonan paraphrases as: “The Defence Forces have no knowledge of this research . . . this guy Clonan has concealed it from us. They also alleged that I had fabricated the findings [and] falsified the research . . . And that immediately had the effect of putting me under huge pressure reputation wise . . . In the Institute of Technology, I was invited to a meeting with a member of the senior management team, who said. . . ‘Every time I turn on the radio or turn on the TV or open a newspaper, I see your former boss, the chief of staff, more or less saying that they don’t know anything about this and that you made it all up’.”
He thought he was going to lose his job. He was erroneously told by others he would be prosecuted for breaching the Official Secrets Act. He received abusive messages and silent calls in the middle of the night. Former friends turned on him. “At the same time my mum passed away, one of my sisters was diagnosed with breast cancer. She passed away. We lost a little baby girl, my son was diagnosed with a neuromuscular disease. [But] that abuse continued, and it was relentless. These were people who I served with ... I trusted them and they trusted me ... The military authorities embarked on a campaign of reprisal and character assassination in order to discredit me as a person, as an Army officer, as a citizen, as a scholar... My dad, who’s passed away a long time now, looked at me and said, ‘I thought you knew what you were doing’.”
He held his own in the media. He had documents proving his side of the story. He was contacted by then minister for defence Michael Smith who asked what he should do.“I said, ‘please, have an outside independent investigation’. In September 2002, within a week, he announced an independent government inquiry called the Study Review Group [under Dr Eileen Doyle] to investigate my research and find out if there was any substance to it.”
Clonan’s research was vindicated by their findings in 2003. He had earlier initiated a libel case against the State, which was settled in 2005 (for €38,000). Since then, he has received just a handful of supportive emails from Army personnel. “The silence is still deafening... When I meet people from the Army I just don’t know how they’re going to react to me. What I really found hurtful is the silent treatment. We have a wedding album at home. There’s all these guys at the wedding who won’t talk to me.”
One day he was on Grafton Street watching a busker with his family, one child holding his hand, one in a buggy. A retired Army officer walked up to him and pushed him twice in the chest with the heel of his hand. “He said, ‘who the f**k do you think you are?’ ... Of course, the kids are terrified and the two of us are like completely and utterly in shock. Why would a right-minded person behave like that?”
I wouldn't consider myself exceptional or unusual in advocating for our child
He has his theories. He knows that many whistleblowers experience similar reprisals, although he’s hopeful that the Irish public understand the importance of whistleblowing now. He thinks that the Irish Army, as well as inheriting buildings from the British, inherited a problematic cultural and class infrastructure. “There’s an anachronistic culture there that is an echo of the British army of the 1920s, a sort of a blind loyalty and obedience, negative reinforcement, hostile scrutiny, fear of reprisal. There is no place for this in our Defence Forces in the 21st century.”
He pursued his new career as an academic and security analyst (formerly with The Irish Times; currently with journal.ie). He is a Seanad candidate (he also ran in 2016 and 2020). He has become a disability rights campaigner, advocating for his teenage son, Eoghan. In September he publicly highlighted the fact that Eoghan was denied disability supports he needed on the basis that he had been offered a place in Dublin Business School (DBS), a private college, and not a publicly funded institution. Eoghan, who has a neuromuscular condition and is partially sighted, needs the help of a scribe, a personal assistant and assistive technology in order to attend. Shortly after Clonan drew attention to the situation on Twitter, Minister for Higher Education Simon Harris announced a change of policy that would benefit not just Eoghan but other students with disabilities attending such colleges.
Clonan is pleased with this result but he doesn’t like how people with disabilities and their families have to perform publicly to get services they need. “Disability should be a fundamental human rights issue, not like a cruel Hunger Games scenario where heartbroken families have to parade their grief on national media to get surgery or a wheelchair – a humiliating lottery,” he says. He also downplays his own status as an activist. “In the same way, I wouldn’t characterise myself as being brave or courageous in relation to the research back in the day, I wouldn’t consider myself exceptional or unusual in advocating for our child.”
Ironically, he credits the Army with teaching him to fight. “Oglaigh na hÉireann made me the person that I am,” he says.
When former chief of staff Mark Mellett invited him for a meeting in 2019, he thought it signalled a reformed institution. When, two years later, he heard the disclosures in Katie Hannon’s documentary he “felt sick”.
He is amazed by the bravery of the participants. “Women of Honour is I think the turning point that’s going to bring this thing to an end. Their voices have to be central to whatever steps are taken next.”
If the Army in and of itself is an unsafe place for women, then it's not fit for purpose
In the aftermath of that broadcast some other things happened. Access to Clonan’s PhD was temporarily restricted by DCU in response to two interviewees who felt they were identifiable in the appendix. It was shortly thereafter decided that it would be returned to the library without the appendix. The full document will be made available to researchers on request, based on the author’s consent. Clonan declines to comment on this.
He has also been contacted by dozens of young military personnel with their own stories. It saddens him that there has seemingly been so little institutional change. He wouldn’t encourage his daughter to join the Defence Forces, he says. “A lot of officers who participated in the reprisal against me have been promoted within the Defence Forces . . . On their watch 21 years of that abuse has continued.”
He believes that given the challenges of potential Irish reunification in the decades ahead, a reformed Army will be a necessity and that the Women of Honour should be at the centre of any reform. “The mission of our Defence Forces is to protect and serve and defend Ireland and its citizens from external and internal threats. If the Army in and of itself is an unsafe place for women, then it’s not fit for purpose.” Before I leave, he says: “Oglaigh na hÉireann doesn’t belong to a bunch of senior officers in the Defence Forces. Oglaigh na hÉireann belongs to the Irish people. And we want it back.”
