Defence Forces: Motion Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-21 ============================================================ Tom Clonan (IND), University of Dublin I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Dooley, for coming along today and I thank Senators Wilson and Gallagher for bringing forward this Private Members' motion. It gives us an opportunity to talk about defence and security at a time of near unprecedented flux and turbulence in the geopolitical security environment. That is one lens through which we need to look at our security and defence but another, probably more important one - if you can imagine that at this time - is what is on the political horizon, which is an all-island entity of some form. At present, we have six counties in NATO. I do not know if they will remain in NATO but whether they do or not, the future of our Defence Forces has to be interoperable and up to the same standard as NATO. If we are going to get acceptance from all communities on this island for the future of our Defence Forces, the expectations of security guarantees will be very high. They will at least be at the level NATO provides them at present. I said to the Minister, Deputy McEntee, before she came in here that, as we speak, President Trump is going to make a speech at Davos. I do not know what impact that will have on the transatlantic relationship in the context of Greenland, but I do know it is part of the Gerasimov Doctrine and an aim of the Kremlin to dismantle the current security architecture in Europe and to drive a wedge between Europe and the United States to break that transatlantic relationship. You could almost say the report of the Commission on the Defence Forces on their future, which did great work, already is out of date. I agree with the calls of our colleagues across the floor to move to level of ambition 3, the most ambitious level, as soon as we possibly can. I put in two amendments to the Private Members' motion, one of which relates to calling for an end to the systemic sexual violence, bullying, harassment and reprisal within the Defence Forces. This has been established without a shadow of a doubt and it is a phenomenon you find in the military internationally. What makes us different from the international military and from other areas of Irish society where you have bullying and sexual harassment, is our Defence Forces have been very slow to acknowledge the fact. Now that they have, I welcome that and they are moving on. However, I brought this to the fore as a serving officer in 1996 to 2000, when I did my doctoral research, which revealed this endemic and systemic sexual violence and reprisal within the Defence Forces. I became a target of that reprisal myself. The study review group was an independent Government inquiry set up in 2002 at my behest, by the then Fianna Fáil Minister, Michael Smith, and that study, which was very comprehensive, also vindicated my findings. It found that not only were female personnel subjected to systemic bullying and sexual assault up to and including rape, but also young male personnel, particularly in the overseas environment, were also subjected to grooming, sexual assault and rape. There was a wave of suicide among young male troops associated with that. This led to the setting up of the Ombudsman for the Defence Forces and the independent monitoring group, which continued its work until 2012. Then, in 2021, the Women of Honour came forward with fresh disclosures of sexual violence. This was reinforced by the findings of a judge-led independent review group, IRG, which sat for a year over 2022 and 2023 and found the Defence Forces in 2023 to be a workplace environment that barely tolerated women. That, in turn, has led to a full sworn judge-led inquiry in Smithfield, which is seeking to address the questions I brought up 25 years ago. If we are going to attract young men and women into the Defence Forces, culture is central to that. We inherited the cultural infrastructure left behind by the British in 1922 and for some reason in the 1920s, they adopted the cultural infrastructure of the British army of the 1920s. That has to go. I am alarmed to see it is reported the Department of Defence has paid a British army colonel to advise and give talks about workplace culture in the Irish Defence Forces. In the international literature, the peer-reviewed military literature, the British army is considered to be the most socially conservative in NATO. We should not be getting advice there. We should be getting advice from perhaps the Bundeswehr, where they have this speak-up culture of " innere führung ". That is where we should be going for advice. Finally, the situation has changed dramatically. We need to radically expand - I have submitted it as an amendment to the Private Members' motion - the Reserve Defence Force. We need to expand that because the demands of this ever-shifting hybrid grey zone conflict that confronts us, and we are going to be caught up in it, is the digital, cyber, artificial intelligence-enhanced defence measures, electronic counter-countermeasures and all that stuff. We have a population that is exceptionally skilled in those areas. We also have a population who would be more than willing and delighted to have the opportunity to give voluntary services to the State in this regard but they cannot currently because the Reserve Defence Force has been so diminished. We are a country with a population similar to Finland, which has a reserve defence force of 870,000 men and women. We could definitely expand that in a very cost-effective way to prepare us for all the climate change-related, natural and man-made challenges that are going to confront the State, everything from Storm Éowyn to drones over Dublin Bay. Let us mobilise the people. I welcome the Private Members' motion. I apologise, I have to go to a meeting with the disability committee with our new Minister of State, Deputy Higgins. I do not know if my amendments will be accepted but I thank the Members for the opportunity to discuss them. I hope the Minister of State will pass on some of those concerns and observations to the Minister. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-01-21/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:31+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-01-21