It is simply a scandal: our Defence Forces number under 11,000, and the civil service which administers those Defence Forces number only 440. That means for every 25 soldiers there is just one gallant pen-pusher in the Department of Defence, even as Air Corps winchmen dangle idly above mountainous seas, sailors take it easy amid Atlantic hurricanes, or our soldiers snatch the odd bit of sunbathing between incoming mortar rounds in southern Lebanon or build refugee camps in the midwinter mud of Kosovo.
The State exists - as we all know - to provide employment for civil servants, who in return then help out in the administration of that State. We should be grateful to them, though I myself have never seen a civil servant in a foxhole, or hauling a half-dead sailor from the cold sea, or being almost comatose from seasickness while patrolling our waters north by north-west of Malin Head.
Round numbers One civil servant for every 25 soldiers is a nice round number. Denmark - a remarkably similar country - also likes nice round numbers. It manages with one civil servant for every 500 soldiers. Why not have even rounder numbers, making sense to politicians and civil servants alike? Why not have no Defence Forces at all, so that a greatly enlarged Department of Defence could absorb the entire defence budget and concentrate on the serious business of running itself, without distraction from those pesky people in uniform?
Is it surprising that the senior ranks of the Defence Forces were excluded from the draft development of the Defence White Paper? After all, these men have spent their entire adult years serving the country they loved, have risked all in the maintenance of peace around the world, and having buried those colleagues and friends killed on active service, have then returned uncomplainingly to their own perilous duties; why on earth should they be consulted on what they understand better than anyone? No, no: best leave it all to the civil service.
Listen to the words of Peter Kelly of Price Waterhouse Management Consultants in the review of the Defence Forces: "We would earnestly caution against taking a selective approach to the implementation with an undue focus on cost-cutting. Our proposals comprise an integrated package of change which should not be compromised in terms of its ability to bring about meaningful longer-term benefits. . .it will be vital to retain the confidence and co-operation of the Defence Forces. This will not be possible if the implementation process is approached on a selective, cost-cutting basis."
White Paper
Retaining the confidence and co-operation of the Defence Forces is precisely what the draft White Paper has not tried to do. The clunk you heard was baby and bath water going down the drain. But still, the confidence and the co-operation of the civil service has been all but guaranteed - which is probably the most important thing. And when we have a no-brigade army, and the Air Corps consists of a memory or two being wafted around Casement, and the Naval Service is a disused and rusting dockyard in Haulbowline, the Department of Defence can settle down to doing what it does best: sharpening pencils and filling in requisition forms to be considered at great length before being rejected in triplicate by the Department of Finance.
One thing keeps the Army of the Republic together. Call it what you like - morale, esprit de corps, loyalty. It is a brain thing, not technology, not the prospect of advance, not fancy and exciting weaponry. It is the glue which binds the Defence Forces.
It is a sense of service to one's country, and to the armed forces which are sworn to defend its interests and the orders of its democratically elected leaders. Keen soldiers have a nickname in the Army: believers. They are devoted servants of their country who could be earning far more out of uniform than in. They stay in because they believe.
Or rather, they stayed in because they believed. Now, middle-ranking officers - even men of the Rangers' Wing - are fleeing the Army because morale is collapsing and a sense of purpose is vanishing. Soldiers are embittered because they feel they have been betrayed by politicians and the civil service; and in that belief they are right.
Deafness claims
When soldiers hear Ministers for Defence castigating the Army over soldiers' deafness claims, why should they not feel angry? Do Ministers for Agriculture attack farmers in such a fashion? For who in this democratic Republic was in charge of the Army? Some military junta? Or a public service which had one public servant for every 25 soldiers, and a Minister for Defence answerable to Dail Eireann? Which civil servant 10, 15, 20 years ago, demanded that soldiers wear ear protection? Which elected politician - or journalist, even - did the same?
It has been a sorry tale; but a sorrier tale still lies ahead. If current defence policies are maintained in the present economic climate, talented people simply will not join the Defence Forces. They will be cherished elsewhere - either in industry or, especially, in the Royal Irish Regiment, which deeply covets the huge military talent Ireland naturally produces. We are close to sacrificing one of the greatest institutions this country has produced. And, no, I am not referring to the Department of Defence