Defence Forces: Motion Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-21 ============================================================ Joe Conway (IND), Cultural and Educational Panel Yes, I have a couple of things to say. They mainly centre around what Senator Clonan was talking about and that is, unfortunately, how we have hollowed out our reserve forces to a great extent, to the current abysmal figure of under 2,000. Senator Clonan mentioned the Finnish model and the huge amount of reserve talent it has and the forces there in Finland. Equally, another neutral country in Europe, Switzerland, has an active reserve force of 200,000 troops. This military service is obligatory for men and then voluntarily for women, up to the age of 34. It guarantees a continuous supply of well-trained troops whose skills are up to the minute and who can operate in the militia mode, that is, people who are based all around the country but who are able to respond quickly and can be mobilised at short notice to deal with exigencies as they occur. People who write books about organisations say there is no organisation on the face of the earth that is perfect. Often, it is evident that the bigger an organisation gets, the less perfect it becomes. I worked in a number of schools during my teaching career. It is a truism to say that schools are not perfect organisations. That can be multiplied by several factors for regiments, companies and divisions in the Army. They are not perfect organisations, and there are many inherent and conflicting motivations. The one thing that differentiates an army from other organisations is that discipline is both expected and unquestioned. That sometimes leads to a shocking culture of subservience on the part of people in the forces who are being bullied or harassed. This is something we addressed here at some stage earlier and something that we must be very conscious of. Somebody said to me that we recently saw the extraordinary success - I suppose we can call it that - of the ousting of President Maduro in Venezuela. The conjecture is that about 800 highly trained American troops were able to go in, remove the leader of the country and cause the deaths of people, including some from Cuba who were trying to guard him. In that context, the person in question, who has an Army background, said to me that we are in such a prone state of self-defence that if a highly trained - let us say Russian - regiment of 800 soldiers landed in Shannon Airport, they could completely subvert all the democratic entities of this State, including the Presidency, the Taoiseach and the Government, within a week. We see what was done in Venezuela and we think of bad actors like our friend Mr. Putin, who, incidentally, did us a great service a few weeks ago. If he was responsible for sending those drones up around north Dublin, it really did more than anything else I can remember to heighten the consciousness of the Irish people to the vulnerability that we have to drones and what could have gone wrong if President Zelenskyy's plane had been taken out of the skies, as I believe it could easily have been. When we take those two things into consideration and we think that a well-trained contingent of fewer than 1,000 troops from a bad actor could demolish the democratic system that we in this and the Lower House hold so dear, we are living in a shocking fool's paradise if we are so complacent that we think it is going to survive everything. The decimation and vandalism that was done to our Defence Forces since the Good Friday Agreement was horrific. Senator Wilson spoke about the barracks in Cavan. Connolly Barracks in Longford was the base for the 4th Motor Squadron. It was a very highly active barracks during the Troubles, but it is now gone. There is talk of building houses there now. This is what we are thinking about in relation to the reserve capability of this country. We are sleeping at the wheel when it comes to defence. An ambition to increase the Reserve Defence Force to 4,000 is piddling stuff. My children talk about it. They have the computer skills and the ability. They are well educated youngsters. Many Senators would have children in that cohort. They can and want to contribute. They could give massively of their services and build up the Reserve capability, not just in the context of packing a Steyr AUG - any old donkey can do that - but in developing the response to the significant modern-day threat of cyberwarfare that we have in abundance but not in our Reserve. The way things are at the moment is both a major flaw and a disgrace. --- 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