When Ciara Prendergast, a retired commandant, married Mark Prendergast she realised that she was becoming part of a military dynasty.
Lieut Col Mark Prendergast, currently in the Golan Heights as officer commanding the 48th Infantry Group of Undof – the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force – comes from a strong military background. His grandfather Pat Prendergast, a cattle dealer, joined the Irish Volunteers in the early 20th century. After independence he left and resumed farming, acquiring substantial lands around Johnstown House, near Enfield in Co Meath, where his son Jim, Mark’s father, grew up.
Jim enlisted in the Army and rose to the rank of colonel – a notch above his son’s current position – retiring as director of the Artillery Corps. Are you chasing him, I ask Prendergast jnr. “I don’t know, but I’m happy doing what I am doing,” he says.
A former chief operations officer with Untso, the UN’s umbrella organisation for peacekeeping and monitoring in the Middle East, Prendergast has also been chief instructor of the Defence Forces Cadet School and second in command of the Army Ranger Wing special forces. He has also notched up a platoon-sized collection of leadership qualifications.
Ciara Prendergast comes from a Carlow family with no military background, but she had her own successful career in the army. She and Mark met while attending cadet school. She left secondary school in 1986, saw an ad in the paper and thought a military life sounded “a little bit different”.
Ciara’s career, which lasted more than 22 years, brought her to Athlone, Curragh Camp and, twice, to Lebanon with Unifil.
Promoted to captain, she became part of the Defence Forces’ personnel directorate, then was made commandant in charge of the cadet school at the Curragh. She left the army in 2010.
Mark spent two years in Damascus, driving home to Ireland in 2009 through pre-civil-war Aleppo with their children Cian, Sam and Lara, now aged 15, 12 and nine. They both say that their children take military life and their father’s six-month absence in their stride. But does she – do they – worry about the mission?
“The confidence I would have in the training and the safety and the drills and the procedures is not a confidence another person who had not been in the Defence Forces could have,” she says. “So, from my point of view, I think that is very comforting, to be able to say to the kids, ‘You know what a good soldier Dad is.’ ”
Does it make life easier for him knowing that, back home, there is an enhanced understanding of what he’s doing?
“Absolutely,” says Mark. “It’s very hard for me to think of that, because it’s part and parcel of the deal. [But] I’m lucky because . . . we’re in a strong position: Ciara knows better than any professional colleague I have what my strengths and weaknesses are. So she could pick up in a heartbeat in a phone call – she will know straightaway what’s going on.”
“Do I?” she says.
“Ah, yeah. So we’re in a very strong position. Both of us hate the phase we’re at at the moment,” he replies, referring to the fact that it’s only a few days until he leaves. “You just want to get started. But we understand that.”
“This is a very nitpicking time,” Ciara says. “These last few weeks, we will annoy each other. We’re not ones for big pottery-throwing arguments.”
“Yet!”
Prendergast has been a bit semidetached from home since July 2014, when he was appointed OC of Finner Camp, in Co Donegal, in the knowledge that he would be leading the 48th to the Golan Heights for six months in April 2015. But when he’s at home he’s very involved in his children’s sporting activities; he himself is a marathon runner and daily jogger.
“They’ll miss him from that part of their lives. Massively.”
Does he bark orders at home?
“Oh no!” says Ciara, laughing. “He’s silent and deadly most of the time.”
