Now that Catherine Connolly is our 10th president, her role under Article 13.4 of the Constitution as supreme command of the Defence Forces comes into sharper focus. Although she has been sceptical and critical in relation to increased defence spending by Nato states, the plain fact is that Ireland’s Defence Forces has been allowed to atrophy over the last 40 years to a shameful extent.
At the beginning of this year we had an army with about 7,500 full-time members. As of August 2024, our first-line reserve numbered 167 members and the second-line reserve, the successor to the FCA, has 1,456 members – out of a theoretical established strength of 3,869. The Naval Service was in an equally worrying state.
Ireland has one of the largest maritime areas in the European Union. At 880,000km sq, it is roughly 10 times the land mass of the State. It consists of our territorial seas extending 12 nautical miles from land, an economic zone extending 200 nautical miles and the adjacent continental shelf over which Ireland has exclusive sovereign rights. The Naval Service has four offshore patrol P60 class ships and four smaller patrol vessels.
Euphemistically, we are told that of the four offshore patrol ships, three are available “on a rotational basis”, while the fourth is unavailable for maintenance reasons. In reality, due to manpower shortages, the Naval Service struggles badly to keep two patrol ships at sea. By any standard, this naval weakness is unacceptable. The aerial wing of the Irish Defence Forces is also correspondingly weak.
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Ever since the Belfast Agreement in 1998, physical infrastructure of the Defence Forces has been deliberately shrunk to an alarming extent. Closing most of the network of Army barracks that existed in the 20th century was described, again euphemistically, as a “peace dividend”. One consequence of the massive sell-off of Defence Force installations has been the virtual elimination of the previous volunteer reserve capacity in the form of the FCA.
Right across Ireland, in living memory, more than 20,000 FCA volunteers participated in training and reserve functions by attending weekly at local Army barracks and training centres. When they were needed, FCA members provided weekend security at reservoirs, airports, electricity infrastructure and other vital national infrastructural locations including broadcasting bases and even sewage plants. While the need for an effective Army reserve may have changed in character, it has not disappeared.
We complacently ignore contingencies that are readily imaginable.
While Northern Ireland is relatively peaceful, the underlying potential for violence still exists and could easily be magnified in the context of any movement towards constitutional change.
How many Irish women and men could, if called upon, rally to the flag and handle an automatic weapon? How many Irish students, trainees and apprentices could assist the Irish State in an emergency? More worrying is the question as to whether the full-time Army membership could face down well-planned widespread political violence of a paramilitary kind were it to emerge.
In Dublin city, only two Defence Force installations remain – McKee Barracks on Blackhorse Avenue and Cathal Brugha Barracks in Rathmines. Green ministers called for Cathal Brugha Barracks to be developed for house building. That would have resulted in the closure of the only significant military post in the Greater Dublin Area.
When a commission was asked to report on the future of the Defence Forces, its report conveniently examined three scenarios in terms of defence expenditure. Predictably, the government of the day opted, as was always intended, for the middle course.
Parallel with ongoing physical degradation of the Defence Forces in terms of numbers and infrastructure, decades of political neglect and downgrading have occurred under successive governments. The role of the Department of Defence was initially twinned with Fisheries (derisively called the Ministry for Fish and Ships). Later, the Defence Department was allocated to the Minister for Justice, and still later the position has been allocated to the Minister for Foreign Affairs.
The war in Ukraine has taught us that conventional warfare has drastically changed in character. But some things remain unchanged. The need for an adequate army, air wing and naval service has not gone away, you know. We need a reserve structure that would give the government of the day a trained force including reservists of up to 20,000 men and women. We need a navy and an air service that can actually exercise Ireland’s rights and obligations in relation to its territory – by land, sea and air.
The Defence Forces needs to be able to confront and overcome any conceivable paramilitary challenge to the State’s authority wherever and whenever it may emerge. This entails protecting the State from cyber attack, drone activity, under-sea disruption to vital cables and pipelines as well as confronting drug trafficking.
Without pretending to be a match for superpowers, Ireland badly needs to face up to the minimum responsibilities entailed in our independence, no matter what our policy on neutrality or alliance may be.
