The Government-appointed consultant who reviewed the Defence Forces has dismissed the White Paper on Defence as contradictory, negative and lacking in vision and has described its publication earlier this week as a farce.
Mr Tom Murray, partner in Farrell Grant Sparks (chartered accountants) and author of the 1994 and 1998 reviews of the Army, Naval Service and Air Corps, conducted for the Government by Price Waterhouse, told The Irish Times that the White Paper was "very confusing" and did not live up to expectations in terms of a policy for the future.
Mr Murray, who was a senior Department of Finance official before leaving for the private sector, has been an influential adviser on policy for successive administrations, with 14 years of consultancy work for 15 government departments and a range of semi-state bodies under his belt.
The White Paper was published earlier this week by the Minister for Defence, Mr Smith, amid continuing controversy over eleventh-hour agreements with the Chief of Staff, Lieut Gen David Stapleton. A final version of the official document, which was already widely leaked in draft form, is to be published later this month.
"If this is what a defence policy is, I am very confused", Mr Murray said yesterday. "I don't see this as a vision of Ireland as an independent nation-state, determined to take its place in the international environment and asserting its neutrality and sovereignty."
With only four pages on policy and most of the rest of the 76-page document dedicated to military structures, the approach was one of "simply trying to save money at all costs", he said. What should have been an attempt to outline a strategy and restore some dignity and pride to the military after almost a decade of recommended cutbacks was, in fact, a missed opportunity, he maintained.
This did not live up to the policy statement called for by the consultants when first appointed in 1994 to undertake the first of two Defence Forces reviews. "No other White Paper would ever take such a negative tone. Imagine a White Paper on education or rural development starting off with a statement that it didn't really see the necessity for this anyway, and it was costing too much - that's the approach it takes."
That first consultancy review which Mr Murray was main author of had recommended the severe cutbacks in Army numbers which aroused such opposition within the military at the time. The second review - of the Naval Service and Air Corps - was welcomed as a boost for those two defence wings, in backing their multi-tasking roles and in drawing up a detailed £235 million reequipment plan for both.
The sections in the White Paper on the Naval Service and Air Corps were non-committal in terms of the consultants' recommendations and were contradictory in parts, Mr Murray said.
"The authors actually went against some of our key recommendations", he noted. "We recommended an eight-ship fleet with a multi-tasking role. The document refers to the value of a single agency in terms of avoiding duplication of resources, but several sentences later it consigns part of the fleet to fishery protection only."
Similarly, the White Paper was non-committal in terms of the consultants' recommendations for the Air Corps, he said. Mr Smith's announcement on Wednesday of a £55 million package which would buy at least two medium-lift helicopters for the Air Corps appeared to have done nothing to clarify this.
"Two helicopters will allow the Air Corps to run one search and rescue base only, and won't give it enough resources to take over both Dublin and Shannon, currently out on contract to a civilian operator. That's why we recommended four such helicopters. If they only get two, it leaves them nowhere. And the final decision has been referred to this high-level civil-military procurement group.
"The gratuitously insulting way in which the document has approached the Naval Service and Air Corps will only sow further seeds of doubt and cause further angst", Mr Murray said. "It would have been better to make no reference at all to these two defence wings than to do what it has done.
"To have a Naval Service purely for fishery protection purposes makes no sense, and to have an Air Corps purely for search and rescue purposes makes no sense. The authors of this seem to have ignored the point we made in 1998 that if the primary role of the Naval Service and Air Corps was not to be military - which we supported - there was no justification for them at all."
The document was dominated by Army structures, and the whole maritime aspect of sovereignty, for which there had to be a Naval Service, had been virtually dismissed.
Mr Murray said that the controversy over the report's publication was unseemly and he was mystified as to how the Department of Defence could have walked itself into that situation, given the sensitive nature of the issues involved.
During the first review in 1994, the consultants had made references to tensions between the civilian and military sectors of the Department of Defence, which the civilian officials had tried to play down. "It is quite obvious that these tensions still exist, and this has done nothing to build bridges - only to widen the gulf."
The White Paper was not an objective and positive assessment of Ireland's situation in the international environment or a strategy for the future, he said. "I think we are still in need of a policy document on defence."