Sir, – Recently there have been media reports of the permanent Defence Forces being put on standby to deal with possible difficulties arising at Dublin Airport, due to the shortfall in staff to deal with passenger management. I would be totally against this and the time has come to stop using the Defence Forces as some kind of dish-cloth to clean up corporate deficiencies and civil inadequacies.
A report has agreed that the time has arrived for the Defence Forces to be fully modernised and transformed into an entity that can deal with State security in a manner tailored to the threats from analytic intelligence malfeasance, our open coastal exposure, and air space.
What we have from Government is the same backward thinking of using the force as a sort of mobile intervention unit in civil necessities.
One can understand this in times of natural disasters or imminent terrorist threats, but to call out the force to micro-manage the response to failings by a corporate body because of its poor management decisions is to make a laughing stock of the Defence Forces, which itself is open to criticism due to the poverty of foresight of successive governments in not keeping step with the times.
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The Defence Forces cannot be an army in the old sense of that term but it can be a security force of a high order if the necessary restructuring and investment are implemented for this to happen. – Yours, etc,
DAVID LYONS,
Dublin 8.