These won't be popular questions, but we may as well ask them anyway. Why do we persist in having an army? What is its purpose? And if it has one, does it achieve it?
Or is the Army like one of those organs left over in our bodies from some era when they had some function, but now seem to have no duty other than as a seat of disease or death? The analogy would once have been absurd; but no longer. The Army deafness claims, which could soon jeopardise the entire well-being of the state and the very people the Army was called into existence to defend, suggest that maybe we should deal with the Army in the way that a surgeon would deal with infected tonsils or an inflamed appendix.
It is a painful subject, because the Army has earned a deservedly high reputation among the plain people of Ireland. The creation of a standing army has until recently been a mark of separate nationhood, of independence. The establishment of defence forces answerable to Dail Eireann, with a different military culture, different salutes, different drill and different uniforms from the British, came to be regarded as one of the keystones of independence, most emphatically vindicated in September 1939.
Distinguished service
Perhaps it was the Congo which gave Irish people a first clue of how professional the Army was, and in Corporal Browne MM, the first real post-independence hero. And the storming of the Tunnel, held by gendarmes and mercenaries, by exhausted Irish soldiers who had just completed a two-day journey by piston-engined airliner across Africa remains one of the minor epics of UN military lore. Since then, of course, the Army has distinguished itself in southern Lebanon, where our soldiers are admired for their decency, their courage and their stoicism in a mandate which has now lasted some 20 years.
All well and good. But is that what we have an army for? To spend two decades manning the border marches between two hostile cultures in a far-flung corner of the former Ottoman empire - is that it? All that money, all that training, all that sense of discipline and dedication so that the greater part of a national army may spend its entire existence policing, but certainly not solving, a dispute that will last as long as the Crusades?
And in the meantime, along has come the Army deafness claims, which might rise to £1.5 billion, and will, if present trends continue, cause a tax rise and a reversal of an economic strategy which has been accepted by every government for the past 20 years. One might parenthetically ask here: How successful was the Army in inculcating a sense of duty, of pride, of patriotism, in those who served within it, if such a vast press of ex-and serving soldiers see fit to sue for hearing damage?
Gendarmerie tasks
The answer perhaps wouldn't matter if the Defence Forces performed duties which could not be done by anybody else. Fisheries protection aside, that isn't the case. Air-sea rescue has in part been privatised and most internal security duties, including Border patrols, are essentially gendarmerie tasks which could be done equally well by specialist police units. Even the Rangers are not quintessentially a military outfit - after all, the organisation on which they are modelled, and by whom they were initially trained, was the German border police anti-terrorist unit.
So what have we an army for? It has no armour, no artillery, no air component, no missile capacity, no proper logistical component, no troop-carrying helicopters; just a bunch of men and a few women, prepared to do . . . well, what, precisely? Abroad, virtually nothing without the assistance of other countries; and at home, what can the Army can do that the Garda Siochana cannot do?
These are hard questions, because they strike at a traditional concept of nationhood which arose in a world full of aggressive and acquisitive empires, when to have attempted sovereignty without the means to defend it would have been folly. Even when a state was unable to defend itself against any serious enemy, as this State has been throughout its existence, it had at least to pretend. And of course, soldiers with their pomp, and their uniforms, seemed to represent the soul of their nation.
But the age of dynastic empires and totalitarian tyrannies is over. Democracy circles the globe. So who needs the vast standing armies which remain as tonsils and appendixes from that now-vanished epoch when an unsecured border crossing-post could allow an enemy in to sack your galleries and loot your palaces or permit slave-traders to whip your people off in chain-gangs?
Paradoxically, throughout the Western world, in their ornamental redundancy, soldiers are now regarded as a vastly more precious life-form than the citizens they are pledged to defend. Civilians might die in number without causing the political uproar which results when a a soldier or two gets whacked on foreign duty.
National pride
Armies were once able to implement foreign policy without anyone thinking it perfectly shocking that soldiers might be killed in the course of their duty. While soldiers in dress uniform still evoke national pride in any country, here in Ireland it seems there is also a growing legal consensus that they shouldn't actually hear gunfire without being given aspirin and being put to bed with cocoa and a hot-water bottle, with promises of compensation to follow.
The world watched the fall of Srebenice with paralysed fascination, because no nation state was prepared to risk the lives, or even the hearing, of its soldier boys in the cause of protecting the Muslims there. The lives of soldiers are now as precious as the virginity of the maidens their knightly forebears swore to defend. That being the case, maybe all European countries should be asking hard questions about their armies: what use are they? And maybe, just for once, we should be leading the way.