With the Garda now actively seeking to recruit non-nationals, the Army must follow if it is to be representative of Irish society, writes Tom Clonan
This week 193 non-nationals from Asia, Africa and central and eastern Europe successfully completed the aptitude test for An Garda Síochána. If successful at interview, these applicants would potentially represent nearly 10 per cent of the overall intake of student gardaí into the force during the current recruitment phase.
While these developments certainly represent an explicit commitment to equality of opportunity on the part of Garda management, they also reflect the requirement for the specialist language and networking skills of ethnic minorities to complement effective policing across all communities. This is especially so given the globalised nature of contemporary terrorism and organised crime.
For similar reasons, the Defence Forces also need to target recruitment from among ethnic minorities and other nationalities, to acquire invaluable specialist linguistic and cultural knowledge for the Army's missions at home and abroad.
In much the same way as the Garda must evolve into an ethnically diverse police force to effectively fight crime in a multicultural society, it is received wisdom among defence intellectuals that to be effectivean army - in terms of its ethnic make-up, philosophy and cultural orientation - must reflect the society from which it is drawn.
It is a central tenet of contemporary military thought that an army which fails to evolve in step with wider society along those lines will inevitably lose the support of the general population and be thus certain to fail, both in its missions and as an organisation.
The Defence Forces certainly appear keen to reverse a trend which between 2002 and 2005 saw all 35 applications by non-nationals to the organisation fail to meet minimum entry requirements.
The Army is keen to point out in all new recruitment campaigns that it is an equal-opportunity employer.
In addition, it is engaged in an ongoing review of the recruitment process designed to result in Defence Forces more representative of Ireland's multicultural identity.
To this end, dramatic changes are taking place. Just five years ago the Irish military had no equality policies, no equality mission statements at general staff level and no equality officers for its personnel.
Indeed, as recently as 2000 the Defence Forces remained the only part of the State's public service with no clearly articulated commitment to equality of opportunity in terms of gender or ethnicity.
This lack of equality awareness and lack of explicitly stated equality policy also placed the forces firmly out of step with their European and US military counterparts.
It may also go some way to explaining the very low participation rates of women within the Defence Forces relative to the international military. Currently, approximately 15 per cent of Nato armies are female. The British army, often described in international military journals as Europe's "most socially conservative military organisation", is approximately 12 per cent female.
The US military has overall participation rates of almost 20 per cent for female troops. In Ireland, more than a quarter of a century after the initial enlistment of women to the Defence Forces in 1980, less than 5 per cent of our military strength is female.
The military authorities have appointed the Defence Forces' first equality officer, and are due to publish their first detailed equality policies contained within the Defence Forces' Human Resources Strategy Statement in the coming weeks.
The dramatic developments for equality contained within the Defence Forces' human resources strategy statement mirror those in their sister organisation, the Garda Síochána, and will have farreaching and beneficial effects for the Army.
Already the Defence Forces have extended eligibility for enlistment to the Irish Army to any citizen of the EU and what is termed the EEA or the European Economic Area, including Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland.
The Defence Forces also acknowledge the full eligibility for enlistment to the Army of persons resident in Ireland and who qualify as refugees under the Refugee Act of 1996.
The Army will also accept applications from nationals of any other state outside the EU and the EEA, once they are lawfully present in the State and have a minimum of five years' legal residency within Ireland.
In terms of the appointment of officers, Minister for Defence Willie O'Dea is due to publish an updated recruitment handbook for officers this month which highlights Section 41 of the Defence Forces Act.
Under this section, the Minister may appoint as an officer to the Defence Forces anyone - irrespective of nationality - once their application is approved by him. Under this mechanism, the present Minister has already appointed three medical officers, a South African, a Slovakian and a Czech national as commissioned officers.In terms of the low participation rates of female personnel within the Army, the Minister is planning a number of special initiatives in 2006 which will seek to encourage more women to join and redress the imbalance in female representation within the Defence Forces.
About 7 per cent of those serving in the Defence Forces were born outside the State.
The latest initiatives to enhance diversity should increase this figure significantly.
The Defence Forces are confronted with the 21st-century phenomena of global terror networks, asymmetrical warfare and a complex set of peace enforcement and peacekeeping missions abroad.
In all of these scenarios, the battle lines are increasingly drawn along ethnic and religious lines.
It is therefore imperative that the Defence Forces continue to pursue their programme of diversification along gender and ethnic lines to realise fully the enormous potential benefit to the Army that would accrue from such a process.