Defence Forces
Dail Éireann — 2021-09-30
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Mick Barry (PBP), Cork North-Central

Retired company quartermaster sergeant Karina Molloy says, "it is absolutely systemic". It is not a case of a few bad apples, but systemic. Of course, misogyny is part of the DNA of armies and police forces in all capitalist societies. While that is not to say all members of those forces are sexist, it is to say that sexism is part of the culture. Wayne Couzens, the killer of Sarah Everard, was said to have indecently exposed himself on more than one occasion and was nicknamed "the rapist" by colleagues. His brand of toxic masculinity was not a deal breaker for his career until he did what he did last March.
A Government in which the Minister served explicitly excluded the Defence Forces from the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Act 2014. It did not allow members of the Defence Forces to unionise or to strike. None of the above are magic bullets, but had these rights have been in place, they might have acted as some deterrent to abusers in powerful positions. These are not a few bad apples. We do not need a tweak here and there to fix things. We need systemic change to address systemic rot.

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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/dail/2021-09-30/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:38+00:00
Sitting date: 2021-09-30