Defence Forces: Motion Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-21 ============================================================ Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland I endorse what has been said just now and what was said earlier by my colleagues in the Independent Group. I do not want to recriminate, but I want to say this. Over the past 20 years, there has been an absolutely scandalous reduction in the capacity of the Irish Defence Forces. It has been supervised by a Department - I want those in the Department to hear this - that displays an unbelievable insouciance. When I was Tánaiste and Minister for justice, there was a Minister for Defence at the Cabinet table. That is no longer the case. As Senator Craughwell pointed out, it is not very clear as to who is concerned full-time about the Defence Forces and their issues. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a force called the FCA. It was by no means perfect, but it was not Dad's Army. It guarded installations like the Kippure RTÉ transmitter, sewage plants, ESB plants, Dublin Airport, various reservoirs and the like when there was a threat. It carried out that function at weekends in order to provide time-off for small garrisons from the regular Army that protected those locations on a daily basis. We no longer have a cohort of 15,000 to 20,000 people who could come to the aid of the Government if they were asked to do so. Other than members of the Defence Forces and those involved in gangland activity, who can handle weapons ? Who can take orders? Who can conduct searches, as happened when people were kidnapped and so on? Who could do all these things now? The answer is practically nobody. As Senator Craughwell stated, we are down to something above 7,000 people in the Permanent Defence Force. That is from a nominal strength of 11,000. The Reserve has almost crumbled completely. I heard what was said earlier about increased recruitment. However, reservists in the FCA had a local place. It was either a training hall in the back of the local Garda station or a barracks in the county town which they could get to within 20 minutes or half an hour on a Sunday to attend training parades. We are now in the very sad position whereby I do not know where reservists from County Mayo, for example, would do their training. Perhaps they would do it in Galway. This means that they would need to devote a couple of hours to get to the training parade and a couple of hours to get back. The idea of the Reserve Defence Force is much more problematic now than it was then. We have sold off barracks after barracks. Senator Wilson referred to Cavan. There was a military base outside Castleblayney, namely Camp Muckno. I was there myself. There were barracks in Wexford, Waterford and Kilkenny. There is still a barracks in Kilkenny. Right across the country, there were places where a reserve could actually have been organised and trained, but we abandoned that idea completely because we convinced ourselves there was a peace dividend in the wake of the 1998 Belfast Agreement. Things in Northern Ireland could turn quite nasty yet with a Farage government in Britain beating the drum of English nationalism and, perhaps, strident unionism. There is always the possibility that the loyalist paramilitary organisations, which from my reading of northern media are still in existence, could come back with a vengeance. There could be political and community strife in Northern Ireland again, and anybody who says that could never happen is wrong. Nobody predicted what would happen from 1972 to 1998. Everyone thought we were home and dry and that all these things would never happen again. I believe that we need, in the first instance, a dedicated Minister for Defence. We had Michael Smith and, in the Cabinet I was in, Deputy Willie O'Dea. We had a Department of Defence with a dedicated spokesperson at Cabinet. In those days, the defence budget was taken seriously, but what has happened since has been nothing short of shocking. The membership of the Civil Defence organisation is in ribbons. It has lost half of its members. When I was a Minister, I was challenged by Opposition parties to have 2,000 reservists. I got the number up to 1,100 and it sank back to 200-plus under successive Governments, which included members of the parties in the present Government. The whole idea of service to the State has evaporated. I agree completely with the suggestion Senator Conway made, namely, that a small group of determined people with a well-worked-out plan could effectively put this country on its knees by landing at Shannon, Knock or elsewhere in a plane one afternoon. If we cannot guarantee against even that, we are close to the situation that exists in Greenland today, where we cannot defend our sovereign territory. The time has come, I suggest, for us to go to level of ambition 3 as a starting point----- --- 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