Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the members of Fórsa in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council who are visiting. They might be interested to know we are discussing trade union-related matters, but this time with respect to members of our Defence Forces. The Bill seeks to allow them to associate with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. “Allowed to associate with” is an interesting phrase when we think of what trade unionism is supposed to be about. It is not about what people are allowed to do but about representing their own interests and views.

The Bill also provides, among other things, for the establishment of an external oversight body for the Defence Forces. The need for that arises from a whole series of scandals in the Defence Forces and the campaigning of members of the Defence Forces like the Women of Honour over what they allege is a widespread culture of discrimination, bullying, harassment, assault, misogyny and even rape. It is mostly women who have been the victims of that, but I have also been contacted by male former members of the Defence Forces making similar allegations about their own treatment, including sexual assault, bullying and so on. They have pleaded for their cases to be included in the inquiry.

Then there is the treatment of whistleblowers. Much of what I am going to say will be informed by the testimony of a particular whistleblower who has agreed that I can name him and tell some of his story. It will be indicative of the issues that need to be addressed and the failure of this Bill to adequately address them.

I will make a few preliminary remarks on the bigger macro issues with the Defence Forces that have already been alluded to. We have discussed them in other forums, including questions earlier on the matter of the triple lock and the consequences for our neutrality. I reiterate that we believe the betrayal by the current Government of its commitment to maintain the triple lock as part of maintaining Ireland’s neutrality is a disgraceful betrayal of promises made by Fianna Fáil and the Government on this issue. The outrageous claim that getting rid of the triple lock in no way impacts on our neutrality is simply nonsense and illogical. The reason is that the Government, in previous incarnations, described the triple lock as integral to the maintenance of our neutrality. It also because what this does is remove an important check on the ability of a Government to send our soldiers - whose lives and welfare may be at risk in those deployments - into particular military deployments which do not have a check on them from the United Nations.

That brings up the prospect of Ireland getting involved in wars. When Micheál Martin makes reference to this he always talks about Russia. Of course, all of us condemn what Russia has done in Ukraine. It is a brutal and illegal invasion. I find it incredibly interesting, however, that the Tánaiste never talks about the United States in that regard.

The subtext is that we want to move closer to the NATO military alliance dominated by the US, the UK, Germany and so on, which has also been involved in horrific things, not least its support for the Israeli genocide. The Government wants to free us up to have greater involvement with a military alliance involving forces that are sustaining and arming that genocide and that are engaged in a systematic drive towards the militarisation of Europe. That seriously threatens our neutrality and, from the point of view of this Bill and the welfare of the members of our Defence Forces, it threatens their safety. The best protection for members of the Defence Forces deployed abroad is our neutrality. That reputation and Irish troops not being seen as linked to any of the great military-political blocs in the world is their best protection. If they lose that, they will become vulnerable to attack. You mess with that at your peril. You associate with any of the military geopolitical blocs at the peril of our soldiers. That is why we will fight very hard against these moves by the Government.

To return to the substance of the Bill, why do we need this? The poor pay and conditions of soldiers and the difficulty in recruiting and retaining soldiers have already been alluded to. I will name the person I am going to talk about at this point. His name is Sergeant Patrick Gorman. He served in the Air Corps for 35 years. He had an exemplary conduct rating on active service. He served in Lebanon in 1986, Somalia in 1993, Liberia in 2004 and 2005 and Chad in 2008 and 2010. He has an exemplary record. He contacted me because he blew the whistle on his treatment and the treatment of other members of the Defence Forces with similar records who made protected disclosures and who were penalised as a result.

The penalisation might seem a small thing to us but it is very important for people who have risked their lives and, in Sergeant Gorman's case, spent 35 years in the armed forces. They were denied their retirement unit presentation, a ceremony where family members and so on are brought in and a presentation is made to someone who has retired. Sergeant Gorman says that he and five other members were denied this presentation because they blew the whistle on issues to do with health and safety in the Air Corps, issues he says are also relevant to the Naval Service. I refer in particular to working with dangerous chemicals without proper oversight and the lack of accountability for the officers who were supposed to monitor these things but who did not do so. As a result of making that protected disclosure, Sergeant Gorman was penalised in this way. He said that he felt he had to retire because of the failure of the top brass, for want of a better word, to address these concerns.

Sergeant Gorman worked in areas in which I am not an expert but he said that, for example, they had to wear gloves that disintegrated on contact with the chemicals they were being asked to use. In other words, the people working with dangerous chemicals when doing repairs on military aircraft were not protected. He was working with these dangerous chemicals for 18 years without a respirator. It was only in the last two years that respirators were providers. He says that, when he brought this to the attention of Deputy Paul Kehoe when he was the Minister of State in this area, there was talk of reports on air quality. Those reports have never seen the light of day. The men asked for occupational health surveillance and one of the things that was done was to identify whether there were clusters of ill health resulting from the high levels of these intoxicating chemicals in the air in which they were working. He says that, of seven people working in a sheet metal structural shop, none of the seven could have children such was the circulation of these chemicals. That seems quite incredible.

Sergeant Gorman mentioned that carcinogenic chemicals were being used that appear in the film "Erin Brockovich". That is a film about toxic chemicals getting into the water and poisoning whole communities. Those same chemicals were being used. Paint strippers that are banned elsewhere are still being used in the Irish Defence Forces. Contaminated clothing was supposed to be destroyed or treated in a very particular way but soldiers were not warned about this and were going home to their kids with this stuff. It was being mixed in with the rest of the family's washing, including that of children, potentially contaminating it with dangerous chemicals.

When Sergeant Gorman made his protected disclosure, the Workplace Relations Commission told him that he could not take a case to the WRC for penalisation because he was a member of the Defence Forces and was therefore a worker rather than an employee. He and the others could not really get their heads around that distinction. This relates to the question of the new oversight body being proposed. The Secretary General of the Department of Defence is going to be on this body. The problems that will create are evidenced by the response to the parliamentary question I submitted on behalf of Patrick and his colleagues. When I asked about this, the response made reference to the Protected Disclosures Act, stated that there is a distinction between a worker and an employee and said that they should go to the Ombudsman for the Defence Forces. In his response, Patrick points out that, in a number of cases, it has taken up to eight years for the Ombudsman for the Defence Forces to investigate claims that a whistleblower was penalised and that, in some cases, that office has made no determination whatsoever. That is to say, the system does not work.

It is interesting that, in the answer to a second parliamentary question I submitted, which was related to the first question and was about investigating the practice of members of the Defence Forces being denied their presentation on the basis that they had made protected disclosures about issues in the Defence Forces, the response read:

I am not at liberty to discuss or comment on any protected disclosure; however, I am assured by Military Management that no member of the Defence Forces is denied anything on foot of having made a protected disclosure.

Come on. That is a joke. In answering a question about a failure to respond properly to a disclosure and the penalisation of a member of the Defence Forces over making a protected disclosure, the Department of Defence asks military management whether it penalised anybody and, when it says it did not, that is the end of the story. That is the answer we get.

Pay and conditions were axed as a result of the contract changes in 1993 and 1994, meaning that, while a three-star private used to get three-star private pay from year one, it now takes five years to get to the top of that scale. I did not even know these things but Patrick explained them to me. In other words, pay and conditions are worse than they were before 1993-94. People are being asked to do more foreign deployments and so on. I asked Patrick whether that is the main reason it is difficult to recruit and retain personnel. He said that, while it is a reason and a significant one, if he was to name one reason, it would be the lack of an independent and transparent complaints process. That is what he said. There is no independent process to listen to complaints when people are facing bullying or penalisation or when military management is refusing to listen to concerns, complaints or issues to do with the health, safety, well-being and welfare of members or their families. That is pretty serious. In that context, this tokenistic right to associate with ICTU means nothing as members are not to dare say anything about their conditions or pay.

This attitude towards whistleblowers does not give me much faith that the Government, in this defence Bill, is acknowledging the serious abuses, problems and mistreatment of rank-and-file soldiers that result in us being unable to recruit and retain the numbers we need. These issues need to be seriously addressed and I hope I have done justice to Patrick Gorman and the service he has done. The Government should do justice to him and his many colleagues in the Defence Forces who have served this country loyally for so many years.

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