Kathy Sheridan’s column in The Irish Times yesterday. Recommended reading for priests and bishops.
Some will recognise the feeling. That visceral punch when a member of the organisation becomes a public scandal and suddenly the whole body is under white-hot public scrutiny.
How the group responds in those delicately balanced early days may well decide the fate of the organisation.
Even the most PR-hostile company advocates will be aware of one guiding principle. A furious lash of defensiveness may be an understandable human response but the message it sends is the opposite of self-awareness, the truth-searching and unwavering sense of purpose outsiders will look for in the reputational debris.
This is the problem for those Defence Forces advocates currently complaining about feeling collectively demonised and clearly getting a taste of victimhood themselves.
Last Friday, Senator Gerard Craughwell addressed his “dear friends and colleagues of the Defence Forces” on Twitter/X to say that he felt “deserted and thrown under the bus to suit a number of political agendas uniformed and civilian”, that “our most senior officers are following the Taoiseach & Tánaiste and losing the military dressing room” and that as “proud servants of the State”, he and they were owed an apology for the way they were being treated.
In some ways, it’s hard to blame them. In this part of Co Kildare, where some Defence Forces members live among us, what we see is not raw aggression or predatory behaviour but hands-on community engagement and generosity of spirit.
But when Craughwell and Cathal Berry TD – consistent informed voices for a bafflingly neglected pillar of the State – ask aloud whether the Defence Forces are any worse than any other department of the civil or public service, the premise of the question is wrong.
The Defence Forces is the sector under scrutiny. It’s also a vital pillar of the State currently having its complaints processes scrutinised in a tribunal of inquiry triggered by members’ disclosures.
Yesterday, the sense of vindication from what Craughwell called “the voiceless” was palpable when the Journal reported that no further Garda action was planned arising from an independent review of about 26 of those Women of Honour complaints.
Though another 10 remain under investigation, the online claims of “deafening” department silence imply that this is the end of it. No matter that the disclosures echo allegations which date back at least 25 years, when Tom Clonan (now a Senator) first blew the whistle.
What we do know is that a soldier stated in court to be exemplary in his workplace revealed an entirely different persona outside it. That Natasha O’Brien was asking him to stop expressing deeply homophobic comments when he launched a violent, unprovoked assault on her, an attack clearly visible on CCTV.
And that such was the public outcry surrounding his lenient sentence that the Government asked the Defence Forces for details of any other serving personnel convicted of crimes or facing criminal charges.
The first answer was about 20 names but, when asked again, the Defence Forces’s list suddenly ballooned to 68. Are there more ? The point is that no one knows.
We know that it’s up to the accused or convicted member to inform his commander where the gardaí fail to do so. How many do so ? We don’t know. All this remember, has come to public notice as a result of Natasha O’Brien’s fightback. Remember, too, that this is an organisation whose central plank, as expressed in the Vision 2030 document, is “transforming our culture”. That aspiration didn’t stem from an existing well of care, safety and egalitarianism.
Still Berry and Craughwell want to know why similar scrutiny shouldn’t be extended to the wider public sector given the widespread evidence of rape, sexual harassment and bullying throughout society. Craughwell listed the HSE, the prison service and the ambulance service as appropriate places to begin before moving on to the Civil Service and political parties.
The point of this is hard to fathom.
The swing to rage and whataboutery is neither reassuring nor constructive. Who does it serve? The Defence Forces are not a branch of healthcare or just another line of government-paid work. Their raison d’etre is reason enough for a particularly onerous level of scrutiny.
Defence Forces members are pledged to defend Irish sovereignty, protect Irish citizens and secure Ireland’s interests. They take an oath of allegiance in which they swear to be “faithful to Ireland and loyal to the Constitution”.
Their ethos of service to the State, a code of honour shared with many armies, is captured in six values “fundamental to sustaining Óglaigh na hÉireann as a steadfast pillar of the Irish State”.
Knowing what we do of those who honour those values and those who breach them, criminally and otherwise, the list is almost painful to read. Respect. Loyalty. Selflessess. Moral courage. Integrity.
The one that distinguishes them from your average government-paid employees is physical courage: “You must have the physical courage to persevere with the mission regardless of dangers and difficulties. Physical courage comes with commitment and professionalism.”
On the opening day of the Defence Forces Tribunal two weeks ago, Ms Justice Ann Power laid out her view of the forces at their best: “Honour is a cardinal value in the Defence Forces, it is a priceless and hard-won virtue.
It means doing what is right. It means standing up for the truth, the whole truth, even if standing alone. Being a person of honour may at times call upon one’s greatest resources of courage and contributing personal integrity ”
Not quite the same as a civil servant.
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