Defence Matters: Statements
Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-25
============================================================

Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland

I welcome the Minister of State. I will make one contribution, although I would love to say many things. Carrying on from where Senator O’Reilly left off, the numbers in the Reserve Defence Force have fallen to a pitiful amount. In my experience and lifetime, there were in excess of 20,000 people who could, if asked by the State, bear arms or turn out for the security of the State. They could use their military training and experience to support the State. It is extremely naive to think this country will never have a security crisis again. When that time comes, it could arise out of Northern Ireland, a border poll or Farage becoming Prime Minister of the UK and loyalists responding in a particular way. We could have a crisis on our hands very quickly. Successive Governments – I am not making party political points – have effectively collapsed the capacity of reservists in this country to come out, bear arms and serve the State.
It is easy to spend €600 million on armoured personnel carriers. You just put in the order and they arrive. It is easy to order a radar system; the French will deliver it as soon as they are asked. Getting people into the reserve and re-establishing it to 15,000 or 20,000 people who could serve the State is the difficult bit. In the context of what happened with the Garda Reserve, the Civil Defence and right across the board, failing to engage ordinary men and women in serving their country has been our biggest failure. That is the difficult bit for the Government and the Department of Defence. Numbers matter.

---

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/2026-02-25/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:41+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-25