Sir, - The response by Mr John Nolan of the Department of Defence (May 29th) to Kevin Myers demands reply.
Very few people outside the Dept of Defence and the current Government consider the White Paper to be anything other than a long-winded and redundant justification for maintenance of the status quo. The committee that drew up this paper on defence matters (the first in the State's history) contained not a single professional soldier. The submissions made by the General Staff and RACO, which were accurately costed, realistically modest in scope, and substantial in detail, were ignored.
Mr Nolan trumpets the allocation, over the next three years, of £25 million for a plethora of capital purchases. This sounds like a great deal of money but the reality of chronic under-funding of capital purchasing means that such sums are now required annually. Unlike the other worthy expenditure programs referred to, a crucial characteristic of defensive capital purchases is that they would not be inflationary in the current economic climate.
The Army's transport assets are now so depleted that there is not a single battalion that could "lift" one of its own companies (about 25 per cent of unit strength) and move it and its equipment. The Air Corps has been reduced to little more than an airborne ministerial taxi service, with no plans to replace ageing and obsolete trainers, and no commitment to provide it with a meaningful and necessary helicopter capability.
The Naval Service lacks sufficient vessels to patrol our oceanic waters; even if it had them, its ability to find and maintain enough watchkeeping officers and sailors to crew them is in severe doubt. Comically, the White Paper seeks to restrict the military component of the Navy still further, demonstrating (if it was not evident everywhere else in the Paper) that this document was budgetary in nature and nothing else.
Mr Nolan mentions the "integrated personnel management plan". When whole swathes of personnel across the three services are not merely considering leaving the Forces, but actually aspiring to, there is a personnel problem. Mr Nolan's puffing of a professionally discredited White Paper will not be of much comfort to that dwindling number of officers, soldiers, sailors and airmen who still contemplate a career in the Defence Forces. - Yours, etc.,
Neil McDonnell,
Capt (Retd),
Lucan, Co Dublin.