THE OFFICER IN charge of the Naval Service’s operations has hit out at suggestions that the force is failing to meet its responsibilities and strongly criticised suggestions that it is a “one ship” service.
In an exclusive interview Captain Darragh Kirwan, Officer Commanding Officer of Naval Service Operations Command, and his colleague Commander Eoin Smith, who is Fleet Operations Officer, spoke with some frustration about suggestions that the service is incapable of meeting the State’s security needs.
The Naval Service has had a difficult number of years, with extensive reports both in the media and in speeches in the Dáil that staffing numbers have plummeted, that the service was only able to put one ship out on patrol at a time and detailing an ongoing crisis in retaining highly trained specialists.
Kirwan has a long career in the Naval Service and has been head of its training college and in defence headquarters. He has also served in international postings in Operation Irini based in Rome and worked on a NATO mission in Kosovo.
Smith came from a merchant marine background, joining the Navy in his 30s – he has served on international deployments including migrant rescue operations in the Mediterranean and the naval element of the peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.
On the day The Journal visited Naval Service Operations at the naval base on Haulbowline Island in Cork harbour one of the P60 large patrol vessels the LÉ George Bernard Shaw was at sea and the smaller newer LÉ Aoibhinn was also on patrol.
In a visit to the nerve centre of the Naval Operations Centre last Friday a wall of digital maps showed hundreds of ships with transponders across the broad Atlantic and into the Irish Sea. A green line boxed off a huge swathe of the ocean signified as Ireland’s Exclusive Economic Zone and there were also markings for war ships from friendly nations and lines showing where critical infrastructure is located.
The largest map was a live depiction of the Recognised Maritime Picture – in layman terms, all the ships they know are out around the coasts of Ireland.
There are gaps in the digital information flow and Kirwan and Smith stated that it is filled by sending the Air Corps aircraft or naval service vessels to observe, where required. Information also comes via other agencies and European security bodies – in addition to monitoring of open source information from social media and elsewhere.
Specialist intelligence officers are also involved in the process – acting on information gathered by Irish intelligence agencies and from other international agencies and sources.
“Because we are light on resources, we need to be strategic in how we deploy our assets.
“That’s where information, intelligence and data comes in – we decide then if we need to send a ship to have a look or for that matter an Air Corps aircraft,” Smith said.
The secure centre is manned by Naval Service sailors. It was a quiet room on our visit but it is here where the Naval Service monitored and managed the dramatic capture of the MV Matthew as well as rescues and other major incidents.
The operations centre gives orders – or taskings – to ships, and the crews then execute those orders – there are base level operations such as fisheries patrols but also more dynamic and complex national security activities.
“We have our fleet, which is eight ships, and my role is to task the ships to keep them operationally capable, and get them tasked out on a routine and sustainable basis in order to deliver what we call maritime defence and security operations which is out across the maritime domain which is not just within 12 miles but out further than 200 miles off the coast,” Kirwan explained.
Naval Service drug interdiction missions with special forces involvement are a far cry from the Navy’s original sea fisheries role. There was a time when the Navy was tasked with contributing to weather reports for Met Eireann and carrying out water samples for Irish scientists.
They are still conducting boardings and measuring trawler catches but also carrying out surveillance against drug traffickers and questionable “research” ships that may or may not be spy ships.
Kirwan repeatedly mentioned the war in Ukraine and how that has redefined the security picture – the Naval Service has been involved with Irish Air Corps colleagues in monitoring the activities of Russian war ships transiting through Irish waters.
Traversing across the bridge onto the historic island it is clearly visible that a number of Naval Service vessels are tied up inside ‘the Basin’, as it is known by locals. A massive building a refurbishment project is visible with scaffolding around a number of the buildings on the base, many of which date from the height of the Napoleonic era.
Recruitment shortfalls and the problem of retaining highly trained naval sailors have decimated the Navy in recent years. In August of last year Micheál Martin, Tánaiste and Minister for Defence, declared that the service was in an “unacceptable” state and called for a more radical recruitment policy.
In July of this year Martin explained to the Dáil that a number of initiatives were underway to fix the problem.
Latest figures seen by this website put the Irish Naval on a staffing level at less than 750, far below its establishment strength of 1,094. Kirwan said that is recovering, with higher numbers in training – one key aspect in that recovery is that a young sailor who is on sea duty can now make €60,000 per year because of increased allowances.
The Journal has reported widely on the crisis – but mention that there is only one ship available to go to sea to Captain Kirwan and there is an immediate and clear atmosphere of frustration.
“I’ll correct you there – it’s not one vessel. This is important because I hear it from colleagues in other uniforms (in Ireland) and I hear it from colleagues that are deployed overseas, and it is incorrect.”
Kirwan described as a “fantasy” the suggestion that there should be eight ships on patrol: “There would never be eight ships at sea, because that’s not how navies work”.
He said that the issues faced by the service are much more complex than simply manning levels. Two ships, the LÉ Niamh and LÉ Róisín are undergoing work to bring them up to a modern standard.
He also said that there was the issue of two ships which were “compromised by asbestos”. In addition to the sailors crewing ships at sea there are many others engaged in regular maintenance of ships and equipment and engaged in training on any given day, he insisted.
In the past, before the current staffing problems, Kirwan said it was a minimum of two ships with, at times, three ships available to patrol Irish waters.
He agreed that staffing levels are causing problems, particularly with specialists tasked with managing systems while at sea. Rather than the fleet being mothballed, Kirwan said that there were four rotating ships with a minimum of one ship available to be on patrol.
At least one ship is at sea, with one in Haulbowline waiting to go to sea when the first ship returns.
The recently purchased LÉ Aoibhinn, which is a vessel bought from New Zealand, and is intended to patrol the East Coast, is now also available to the service.
That vessel has already shown its worth as it commanded a major search operation off the south coast to find a missing kayaker. That mission, which sadly found the missing man deceased, saw the vessel using a suite of modern sensors and drone technology in its searches.
Kirwan has said the Navy has been able to put two ships to sea where needed and explained that if a major disaster like the Air India crash, which happened off the south coast in the 1980s, happened again, then they have the capacity to send more ships to sea.
Two P70s, the LÉ Aoibhinn and her sister ship the LÉ Gobnait, will be commissioned on Wednesday at the Naval Base. The P60 vessels are much bigger and demand larger crews – the P70s are smaller and offer less of a man power drain on the human resource poor Irish navy.
Kirwan said the plan is to put those vessels to work on the East Coast – The Journal has previously reported that they could be stationed at a purpose built base in Dun Laoghaire.
Their smaller size allows the ships to get in easier closer to shore and also in to major infrastructure projects such as offshore windfarms.
“The Aoibhinn augments what the other ships are doing and frees up the larger, more capable ships in terms of their offshore taskings.
Gobnait is currently in the Naval Dockyard where contractors and civilian employees are outfitting the ship with new kit, which includes electronic warfare tech and other devices.
When asked if the narrative of a one ship mothballed navy “annoys” them Kirwan responds immediately: “Yeah it does because it is incorrect”.
Both were keen to correct what they regarded as inaccurate tropes about the service – and said there had been some badly-informed commentary about capability on social media.
For instance – criticism that a ship is at anchor in a harbour is wide of the mark, they said. It is still working, they insisted, just waiting for its orders to deploy into an operation.
It is clear the global worries around protecting vulnerable critical infrastructure off Ireland – like undersea cables and pipelines – is a key concern for the unit.
Kirwan and Smith said they “don’t lose sleep” on the threats but admit they are getting phone calls from intelligence operatives to make critical operational decisions throughout the night. Kirwan explained that the links with international partners are critical.
“Do we lose sleep? Probably not – but Ireland is no different than any other member state where an awful lot of the same things we’re trying to figure out other coastal nations are also trying to figure out, some of them might be a few steps ahead of us, some of them might be a few steps behind in terms of identifying what are the solutions to this.”
Kirwan believes that one key solution will be a legal approach – he said Australia and New Zealand have tried introducing exclusion zones. Such a move would create difficulties for Ireland but, as revealed by our discussions with NATO in the past, the attack is likely to come in more shallow waters.
The Naval Service has a long history of carrying out major operations – including the aforementioned Air India disaster in 1985 and the seizing of IRA arms shipments from Libya.
When asked if those operations inform the current deployments, the officers said that the learning opportunities tend be much more current than that.
Kirwan said that the Mediterranean humanitarian deployments such as in Operation Pontus and Sophia in which the Navy rescued migrants from drownings were huge learning opportunities.
He said that Ireland has perfected the use of Rigid Hulled Inflatable Boats (RHIBs) to board trawlers in the high seas and bad weather of the North Atlantic. When they used those tactics in the Mediterranean Kirwan and Smith believe that it was the proof of how effective those indigenously developed tactics are.
“All our capabilities overlap from your fishery boardings, in a force five sea conditions and weather. That can translate to a boarding at night on a drug interdiction boarding when it’s more high risk that type of an interdiction operation, where you want an element of surprise – it all feeds into each other,” Kirwan added.
Both officers believe that the future is positive for the Naval Service – Kirwan believes that the service has no choice but to grow in scale to meet demands.
“I think in the last number of years there is a realisation that the Navy has to be bigger and more capable.
“I would hope that holds through. It’s not because I’m in the Navy, but obviously this is our world, and we live it, and we know that while the landmass may be small relative to other European countries we’re actually a large enough maritime nation, and we first of all have to realise that, and then we have to see – how do we actually defend and protect that?”
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