A recent column by Independent Senator Michael McDowell lamented the threadbare state of our Defence Forces and asked the question: How many Irish women and men could, if called upon, rally to the flag and handle an automatic weapon?
Which prompted this reader to answer, “Me, maybe,” and recall how during my teenage years I had been taught how to shoot.
It is truth universally acknowledged that Dublin suburbia in the 1970s was the best place in the history of the world to be young: we had the telly, everyone went to Sunday Mass, including girls, and if you had a few quid you could go into town and buy David Bowie’s latest record. Not only that, but you could also join the FCA.
I don’t recall now how it came about that myself and some friends on the housing estate where I lived came up with the idea of joining the Fórsa Cosanta Áitiúil, now the Army Reserve, but I doubt it included patriotism.
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It was probably prompted by the annual summer camp, where for two weeks you were paid the same rate as a private in the Army, ie a fortune.
We signed up in a Dublin barracks, I think Griffith Barracks, on the South Circular Road (now an educational campus). There was a pledge to uphold the Constitution and a form to fill in where you set out your personal details, then swore on the Bible that what you had written was true. Then you filled in your age.
In my case I was 14. We were issued with uniforms, a black beret with an Óglaigh na hÉireann badge, black laced boots and a heavy wool overcoat with army brass buttons. Our platoon met every Sunday in Cathal Brugha Barracks in Rathmines on the other side of the city from our homes.
We’d get up early, polish our boots, eat the breakfasts our mothers had made, get a bus to Rathmines in time for Mass at the Mary Immaculate Refuge of Sinners church, then march around a parade ground for a few hours while uniformed adult males barked at us. Fourteen-year-olds tend to go with the flow.
I was pleasantly surprised by the summer camps. The first two were in the army facility in Gormanston, Co Meath, beside a beach and the third in the magnificent Duncannon Barracks, perched by the sea in Co Wexford and now a heritage site.
I was happy enough stomping around country lanes in Co Meath singing ribald marching songs. There was plenty of grub, and sleeping in dormitories made for a change. In Duncannon we could leave the barracks in the afternoons and muck around in the water in army canoes.
What surprised me was how much I liked the guns. There was a firing range in the dunes in Gormanston where we did target practice with bolt-action .303 rifles. It gave you the same sense of pleasure that people – men, anyway – get from throwing stones into the sea.
We also fired machine guns, lying on the ground while doing so with the gun up against the side of our heads. The guns made a loud noise, but with your ear right up against them what you heard was their inner mechanical workings.
I was assigned to a mortar unit where we learned how to send missiles the desired distance, but never got the opportunity to fire a live round.
We did, however, get to throw real grenades. The trick was to put your arm back behind you and swing the grenade up and over your head, letting it go as it reached the apex of the arc.
You then had to stay standing – we were in trenches – and watch where it fell, before ducking down to shelter from the muck and stone thrown up by the explosion. The debris took a while to travel through the air, so it was important not to stick your head up until all the scattered material was safely back on the ground.
The pay meant we had ample pocket money for the rest of the summer holidays. But most of us left the FCA before we had finished secondary school, perhaps because we wanted to let our hair grow and not take any more orders from The Man.
I had not yet celebrated my 17th birthday, so my career in the Army ended before I was legally entitled to be in it. By the time I sat my Leaving Certificate, I had civilian buttons on my ex-Army greatcoat and my hair reached my shoulders. Peace and love, man.
