THERE ARE MORE than 560 women serving Ireland in the Irish Defence Forces.
To mark International Women’s Day, we’ve taken a look at the military lives of three of those members.
We spoke to women serving in the army’s Engineer Corps, in the navy and in the Irish Air Corps.
Their work is diverse – from being a chef on board a naval vessel, to fixing and maintaining aircraft engines to devising strategies to keep Irish troops safe at home and abroad.
Their numbers are spread across the ranks with 563 serving female personnel in the military – which works out at 7% of a total strength of approximately 8,000 members.
Most women, 217, work as Privates taking up frontline positions in units across the services.
There are 174 Non Commissioned Officers leading small groups of soldiers, aircrew and sailors while 159 are at officer rank.
Poland to Haulbowline
For Alex Pluchrat her journey from a town near Warsaw in Poland to serving on an Irish naval vessel in the Atlantic ocean has been as surprising as it has been exciting.
The Polish native has lived in Ireland for the last 15-years and joined the Irish Defence Forces after her best friend joined up and returned to her hometown of Athy with stories of adventure and camaraderie from the Irish Naval Base in Haulbowline in Cork Harbour.
Now, when not cooking meals for the crew of the LÉ George Bernard Shaw in the high seas of the Atlantic, she is a gunner on one of the ship’s machine guns.
“If someone would have told me that I’ll be in the military in Ireland seven years ago, I would actually laugh.
“And if someone would tell me that I would be a chef or even laugh harder because I actually absolutely hated cooking before that,” she joked.
But Pluchrat, 30, who has served for five years, believes that her membership of Ireland’s naval service is a “thank you” to her adopted home.
“I would say, Ireland gave me a better life than my own country. So joining the navy, I would say, it’s my big thank you for the country that gave me a standard of life that Poland never could give me,” she said.
The naval chef’s story is just one of the experiences of women in service we spoke to this week.
We also spoke to Lieutenant Colonel Sharon McManus who is one of Ireland’s most experienced officers in the Engineering Corps.
And we heard from Aisling Breslin, 20, who is an apprentice aircraft technician training in the Irish Air Corps base in Baldonnel, County Dublin.
Just two years ago Breslin was working in a meat factory in Waterford and decided to become an apprentice in the Air Corps – maintaining aircraft for missions as diverse as helicopter troop transport operations, rescue missions and medical transfers.
From guns to engineer
McManus began her career as an officer leading an artillery team firing the big guns and then after a stint in college she moved fulltime to the Engineer Corps.
She is the Military Engineering and Energy lead of the engineering branch in the Defence Forces Headquarters.
The Westmeath woman is now one of the most senior leaders in that unit.
She tells stories of leading troops in the dynamic environments of Chad, Liberia and Kosovo as well as roles as military advisor in the Department of Foreign Affairs and a posting to the European Defence Agency in Brussels.
Her journey into her Defence Forces career began at home in Athlone at the age of 17 when she joined the local Reserve Defence Forces group in the town in the 1990s, then known as the FCA.
Despite growing up in a traditional garrison town she didn’t have any family in the services.
That time she spent in the reserve gave her the bug to go full time into the military joining to find a career that she could combine with her interest in the outdoors, sports and science.
“I applied for the cadetship and didn’t really know a whole lot of what I was getting myself into, but understood that it would be active, outdoorsy that there was an opportunity to go to university, which really appealed to me.
“Most importantly, I really wanted to travel overseas, I wanted an adventure, I wanted to do something different. I couldn’t see myself doing the normal nine to five. So I applied to the cadets and was successful, thankfully, and I started in the Army in 96,” she said.
McManus was commissioned as an officer and took up her first posting in Ballincollig in Cork where she led troops tasked with firing the field guns.
The Athlone woman said that in school she always had an interest in science, mathematics and engineering and it was this interest that led her down the path to being an army engineer.
She soon began a university degree course in Civil Engineering in the National University of Ireland, Galway. She combined her full time studies with weekends back at base leading troops and conducting missions like cash in transit operations and guard duty.
That university course then led to the Engineer Corps soon she fulfilled her dream and got that chance to travel overseas and ended up in war torn Chad in what was a dynamic and dangerous mission in the heart of the still troubled African Sahel region.
McManus said that as engineering goes this is in the most challenging of environments – where the structures of camps must provide ballistic protection from incoming fire and even prevent flooding and other natural disasters from reclaiming the base.
As with all military people she plays down the threat but there were a number of moments when the structures she and other engineers constructed to protect her colleagues came under attack.
The engineer terms these structures and methods as force protection.
“In certain overseas missions there were some incidents where rebels would have tried to attack the camp where there were shots fired against the external walls and at the entrances to the camp and our force protection, stood up to those sort of steps,” she said.
In Liberia, on another UN mission, she and her team designed and built bridges to cross rivers that not only served the Irish military but also other militaries and locals alike.
McManus said that the mission focus for her in such instances is to provide engineering services so that the troops can operate in “safe and secure environment”.
While they are just two examples of her engineering work on foreign trips she said that there is a tangible sense of purpose to her work.
“It is very fulfilling and I think that’s what piqued my interest in engineering in the first place, and has kept that interest for me in military engineering,” she added.
Sense of purpose
In all the interviews that sense of purpose is constantly repeated by the women.
For Pluchrat she said she was seeking something that was bigger than her own life.
“I joined into the Navy because I wanted to challenge myself physically and mentally,” she explained.
The Covid-19 pandemic was one of her greatest challenges – staying deployed onboard the George Bernard Shaw with a ban on shore leave.
For seven months she was at sea with four weeks on and two back at Haulbowline – the chef said this was one of her most challenging times.
This combined with a period of extreme Atlantic winter weather causing her to suffer six months of seasickness.
“I really struggled, it was the lowest point and I just questioned everything. But the storm passed and I was fine again so I had to keep going,” she said.
Now on her second sea patrol rotation onboard the Shaw she has got her sea legs and is enjoying experiencing the reality of naval life with shore leave and weekends away from the ship.
On board the ship the area where the sailors hang out off duty and eat their meals is known as the mess. Those difficult days in high seas sapped at the morale but Pluchrat said that was the moment when she saw the camaraderie of the crew the most.
During that period her shipmates decided to get morale back on track – some of the sailors were musicians and singers.
They decamped to the mess on board and played music to lift the spirits – their colleagues drinking tea and “having the craic”.
“It lifted our spirits and you go on then,” she added.
Baldonnel
Aisling Breslin is at the start of her career – a year into a four year apprenticeship to become an Irish Air Corps aircraft technician.
She was working in a meat factory doing quality control for McDonald’s burgers and again it was a relative returning from the Air Corps with stories of their adventures that piqued her interest.
She had taken flying lessons in her spare time before joining and she wanted to follow her dream to work with aircraft.
“I always liked engineering and I hadn’t gone to college but I just wanted to do something different so I went online and applied for the apprenticeship,” she added.
Aisling has completed her basic military training in which she was thought the basic skills of an infantry soldier which included firing a weapon, throwing live grenades and tactics.
But as she used the direct entry method to the Irish Air Corps apprenticeship she was then assigned to the apprenticeship school where she is now learning how to fix and maintain complex aircraft.
One constant aspect of military life that keeps cropping up in all three interviews is the “craic” had with the fellow members of their units.
“Like, I know, that I’ll never have friends, like, the friends I trained with especially because of what we’ve gone through to get this far.
“We’re all living in barracks too here and get together at night and there’s this feeling of being a big team, a big family.
“When it is difficult we have each other,” she added.
That experience has not been the same for every woman who has served in the Defence Forces in recent decades – but all three women we spoke to said that they had not had negative experiences with their colleagues.
The Women of Honour – a group that has been in the headlines again in recent weeks – are a number of female Defence Forces members who claimed that they were victims of sexual assault, harassment and bullying during their time in the military.
That group’s claims led to the commissioning of an Independent Review Group report which is due to be published in the coming months.
As the most senior member we spoke to, Lt Col McManus was best placed to talk about the impact of that issue on female members and the membership in general.
McManus takes a pragmatic approach and believes that the Irish Defence Forces must be a mirror of broader modern Irish society.
“I think the Defence Forces is a reflection of the society that we serve. And I firmly believe that how we act and operate in our own civilian life and in our own homes and society, is how we generally act in our workplaces.
“I don’t tolerate anything outside of the organisation, I don’t tolerate anything inside the organisation. I am a professional,” she said.
And if there are people who believe still in 2023 that women should not be in frontline service: “I wouldn’t say anything to them because I’m too busy doing my job.”
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