INTERVIEW:'This truly is coming home' – America's top general says he's Irish and proud of it
AS CHAIRMAN of the US joint chiefs of staff, Gen Martin E Dempsey is the most powerful military figure in the world, but he’s also proud of being “100 per cent Irish”.
Gen Dempsey, who heads the military body that advises the US president and consists of the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, says: “It runs back to Donegal and Mayo on my mother’s side, and Roscommon and Sligo on my father’s side.”
As a boy, he visited Ireland “pretty much every summer”, spending most of his time at Conloon, near Castlebar, Co Mayo, which he points out is close to Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s home turf.
Both his parents were in full-time jobs and he was looked after much of the time in the US by his grandmother, who was a Jennings from Castlebar and who “made it a point to make sure I knew I was an Irishman”.
He has a strong family link with Rannafast in the Donegal Gaeltacht.
Along the way he has picked up a few words and phrases in the Irish language.
Can he say, like President Obama, “Is féidir linn/Yes we can?” “No, but I can say ‘céad míle fáilte’,” he replies.
Apart from attending the Notre Dame vs Navy game of American football at the weekend, the other purpose of his visit was to meet Minister for Justice, Equality and Defence, Alan Shatter, and chief of staff of the Irish Defence Forces, Lieut Gen Seán McCann.
Just before the interview at Cathal Brugha Barracks he laid a wreath there in memory of all Irish people who died in past wars or on United Nations peacekeeping missions.
He was very pleased that his wife, Deanie, was also invited to take part in the ceremony: “My wife’s maiden name is Sullivan and she’s a Kerry woman. We are both 100 per cent Irish: this truly is coming home.”
As well as his military qualifications, Gen Dempsey has a Master of Arts degree from the prestigious Duke University in North Carolina, where he wrote his thesis on the Irish literary renaissance, with a special focus on WB Yeats.
Asking him for his favourite Yeats quotation, you might expect him to trot out the usual “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”, but he is more sophisticated and optimistic than that.
In the context of the need for nations to work together to meet the “global security challenge”, he cites Yeats’s dictum on the distinction between talent and genius: “Talent perceives differences. Genius, unity.”
Giving his own interpretation of this, he says: “People who seek to unify rather than to point out differences probably have a better chance of having a positive outcome in future.”
Commenting on the situation in Syria, he says: “The human suffering is absolutely tragic. The United States is pursuing a diplomatic and economic course to try to build a consensus to convince Assad that his time is done.
“I am not doing any particular military planning, although we have a force in the area – we have a rather large military posture in the area – so my role at this point is to keep it ready.”
Asked if he is satisfied with developments in Afghanistan, he says: “You can’t be satisfied when you continue to have soldiers, and marines notably, killed, but I will tell you that it is a place where violence and progress are co-existing.
“We’re making really impressive progress at the local, tactical level, notwithstanding this issue of ‘green on blue’ [international troops attacked by their Afghan counterparts] which has increased lately and we’re working and encouraging the Afghans to work to determine why it increased and what we can do to reverse it. But the progress in the security arena, which is my responsibility, is quite remarkable and the Afghan security forces are becoming quite credible.
“We’ve got some distance to travel and we’ve got a couple of years yet before we will seek to have achieved the Lisbon objectives, but my view is, the military campaign is on track.”
Iraq has not been making many headlines lately and Gen Dempsey thinks this is a good sign: “I was there last week and met with our military contingent there, which is modestly sized but is performing an important role in helping them to continue to develop their military capability.
“I met with prime minister Maliki: in an interesting way, he’s as worried about regional issues now as he is [about] his own domestic issues, and that’s actually a good sign.
“The other good sign is that they have had some challenges: the government nearly collapsed, there was nearly a vote of no confidence, there was nearly this and nearly that.
“But the point is that, at every moment when they walked toward that precipice, they chose to solve their problems politically and I think that’s an indicator of progress.”
Of the dramatic changes in the Middle East, he says: “They’re significant and, some might argue, somewhat inevitable. I mean they have had decades of systems that didn’t distribute wealth equitably and so forth. And you know, it is the 21st century and people can connect in ways they haven’t connected before and I think [they] began to realise just how dissatisfied they were.”
