‘An Bord Snip’ (McCarthy Report): Defence

Re: the cuts in the Defence Forces proposed by the McCarthy Report.

Headscratching stuff. The Defence Forces have already been pared down to the bone from a decade-long transformation arising from the PricewaterhouseCoopers report in the Nineties. So where is the ‘fat’ meant to come from, exactly?

Manpower

The PwC report produced an intentionally under-strength Permanent Defence Forces; with the gaps to be filled with a Reserve (the old FCÁ) reduced in size but with more investment in their equipment and training. How does Colm McCarthy and his colleagues propose to square this circle with a cut of a further 500 PDF personnel and losing two-thirds of what’s left of the RDF?

I’m not going to start a discussion of the worth to society of young people having the option of Reserve service. Those who would agree with it need no convincing, and those who don’t never will.

The Equitation School to go? Welcome development, and easy knowing that Charlie McCreevey’s not around anymore…

Infrastructure

Selling off the training grounds is nuts. These are an absolute prerequisite for a trained and effective military, and the relatively small amount of money raised is dwarfed by the waste of resources on inadequately-trained troops.

Likewise selling off Cathal Brugha Barracks, which would attract only a percentage of what it would have a few years ago. The Defence Forces have invested an enormous amount of time, effort and budget in moving the units previously barracked around Dublin into “the Brugha” and renovating it to serve a modern military in the 21st Century (shades of the Spike Island debacle all over again).

Flushing all of that down the toilet is an action we will come to regret, and rather smacks of the old Finance advice to Dev during the Emergency that the country should surrender to any invasion in order to save money.

Equipment

Scrapping the replacements for the Naval ships nearing the end of their working lives means that there will in the very near future be fewer ships available to patrol our EEA and to carry out the coastguard function – which includes rescue and drug interdiction. It is a matter of fantasy to speak about ‘extending’ the lives of these ships (which were built to commercial, not naval standards), and we’re shortly going to be revisiting the spectacle last seen in the ’70s of rusting Naval Service ships tied up at the wharf in Haulbowline.

In light of the above, it’s inexplicable that McCarthy restricts himself to talking merely of Departments being charged for use of the Air Corps VIP taxi service, rather than selling off the (two) government jets and the fleet of supposedly ‘military’ helicopters which were bought recently at enormous cost, and which seem to exist solely to ferry Martin Cullen and his colleagues around the country.

Likewise the recent turbojet trainers could be disposed of – the only fixed-wing aircraft we actually require (and certainly not the government jets) are the two CASA maritime patrol planes, which are part-funded by the EU anyway. Flight training can surely be carried out either commercially or by sending trainee pilots abroad to foreign military academies (both of which already occur to an extent in certain areas). The masters of the universe at Aer Lingus want to become a private company? Then fine: then we cut off the no-costs supply of trained Air Corps pilots which both they and Ryanair rely on, and we the taxpayers will never notice any difference.

UN service

We actually get paid by the UN for Irish soldiers on UN service. It is therefore entirely baffling as to where Colm McCarthy and his colleagues believe that there are significant savings to be made in this regard (non-UN missions such as Chad are a different matter entirely). And the claim in the Report that we should pretend that our UN service should count as foreign aid is the finest example of gombeen-talk that I’ve heard out of officialdom in some time.

Comments welcome below.