Will the Army ever be given the financial capacity to protect this island?

During one of his irascible meanderings on the mediocrity of Ireland in the early 1950s, poet Patrick Kavanagh mocked the Irish Army: “They would certainly be good at defending a field of turnips against an invasion of crows.” He suggested their numbers should be reduced to 500. A damning indictment of neglect morphed into a questioning of the need for an Irish Army at all.

UCD’s Ben Tonra, an expert in Irish defence policy, has pointed out that following the creation of the State “one might have thought that the development of a strong martial tradition would have been a priority”. But it was not, partly because of the experience of Civil War, the contested legitimacy of the small State and the practical capacity of it to maintain and effectively deploy armed forces. Instead, balancing security, defence and neutrality was the Irish challenge, and prioritising support for international diplomacy, disarmament and international peacekeeping was seen as laudable and pragmatic.

Such an approach also suited the Department of Finance. By the end of the Civil War the Army was bloated way beyond what was required for the new Free State. A harsh policy of demobilisation quickly reduced the numbers drastically, while those who were retained or served in the Army in subsequent decades, especially the privates, were poorly paid.

Paltry pay

In the 1940s, a private recounted how he was earning 14 shillings weekly while the British army was offering 7 shillings and 9 pence a day. Thousands deserted the Irish Army for financial or ideological reasons, or in search of combat: a war-time Department of Defence memorandum noted: “There are at present almost 5,000 non-commissioned officers and men of the Defence Forces in a state of desertion or absence without leave … the majority of them are or have been serving in the British forces or are in civilian employment in Great Britain or Northern Ireland.” Over the course of the war, the truer figure for desertion was probably closer to 7,000.

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In 2014, Pdforra, the association representing soldiers, suggested a small number of its members were so impoverished they were sleeping in their cars

The shadow of the Department of Finance remained over the Army. In the 1980s and 1990s, “army wives” were frequently described as “on the war path” over paltry pay. Reviews of the Defence Forces in the 1990s were criticised for focusing on cost-cutting measures and military structure to the neglect of policy; sidestepping the extent to which the Naval Service and Air Corps largely existed for fishery protection and rescue missions.

In 2014, Pdforra, the association representing soldiers, suggested a small number of its members were so impoverished they were sleeping in their cars. As minister for defence then, Simon Coveney responded by saying: “I would encourage any soldier who has had to sleep in his or her car to talk to the officer in charge in the barracks they’re working in … if there’s one thing the Defence Forces do very well, it’s they stick together, they work together and they look after each other.” It was a revealing response, suggesting that, ultimately, problems could be overcome through the soldierly qualities of camaraderie and resilience. A deep-rooted culture of sexism also endured.

Understatement

This week's report of the Commission on the Defence Forces lays bare the consequences of historic neglect and underspending, and it was responded to by Coveney, again Minister for Defence, with the observation that: "What we spend on defence in Ireland and what we have spent does reflect poorly on the priority of defence in Ireland." That is quite an understatement.

In 2000, much was made of the assertion in the Defence White Paper that: “The external security environment does not contain any specific threats to the overall security of the State,” whereas one headline now from the commission’s report is that Ireland is incapable of defending itself against attack by “a full-spectrum force for any sustained period of time”.

Debates about Irish defence policy and neutrality have been infrequent and ambivalent, and they need to be louder. Where does the balance lie between principle and pragmatism? Clair Wills, in her study of Irish neutrality during the second World War, suggested we ask the wrong question about that era: “For most Irish people the question of whether neutrality had been right or wrong, moral or not, had always been the wrong one … their concerns had always been about how to be neutral, how to keep themselves apart from the war without denying that, inevitably, the war was part of them.”

There is a contemporary version of this dilemma. How should we be neutral in the 21st century in a State where, in Tonra’s words “the aesthetic of military tradition holds little sway over the public imagination”?

The commission’s report updates the question posed so mischievously by Kavanagh in the 1950s: what capacity has the Defence Forces to protect the island? And will the Department of Finance fund the Army to the dramatically increased level this week’s report insists is necessary?