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The Irish Defence Forces is undergoing structural changes, but it is not related to a recent court case where a woman was assaulted. The court case involved an Army Private who received a suspended sentence for assaulting a woman. The sentence and compensation awarded to the victim were criticized as inadequate. The Private's use of social media after the assault was also discussed. There are concerns about the conduct of members of the Defence Forces, with over 60 serving members currently before the court or with convictions for serious crimes. The issue highlights a macho culture and systemic abuse within the Defence Forces, as revealed in a recent inquiry into the treatment of women. Hello Ernesto. Hi Constance, what's the crack? Well, big news from the Irish Defence Forces today. Have we invaded Russia yet? No, not quite, but there are some big moves afoot with groundbreaking plans for structural changes to the Defence Forces. Now, the uninitiated might assume that this is all in response to quite a lot of attention that the Defence Forces has been getting over the last week to 10 days because of a particular court case in Limerick, but they would be wrong. I'm going to explain to you later why I think all of these changes in the Defence Forces, announced by the Tanaiste and Minister for Defence, Micheál Martin today, are actually nothing to do with what happened to Natasha O'Brien when she was horribly physically assaulted on the streets of Limerick. Hold on. Well, you may remember that Army Private by the name of Cahill Crockett got a fully suspended sentence after pleading guilty to quite a serious physical assault on Miss O'Brien. He grabbed her by the hair and held her hair while punching her repeatedly in the face. She lost consciousness. She suffered a broken nose, very bad bruising, and also long-term concussion symptoms, which needed monitoring by neurologists. And of course, the emotional trauma alongside that physical trauma that resulted in her having to leave her job in the hospitality sector. However, it seems to be the case that Crockett's own job as a member of the Irish Defence Forces was one of the main reasons why Judge Tom O'Donnell decided to fully suspend the sentence and ordered him to pay €3,000 in compensation to Miss O'Brien, who, after she emerged from the court on that day of the sentencing, expressed her real deep disappointment at the fact that she hadn't really received justice. I think you'll agree with me here, a fully suspended sentence for such a serious assault doesn't appear to me to be justice at all. I don't think it's justice at all. €3,000 for losing her job, a fully suspended sentence for being knocked unconscious, and for that to be shared on social media for this grotty, crotty character to show off to all of his mates. Yeah, clearly, that's not justice. Yeah, that's a very interesting point. He used Snapchat in the immediate aftermath of his assault on O'Brien to send a message to his friends. Now, Snapchat is a social media platform that is meant to delete your messages straight away, but of course, you would be very naive to think that someone somewhere can't get access to them if they need to. And of course, when confronted with both the CCTV evidence and the evidence of his own Snapchat message, which he sent to his friends but said two to put her down and two to put her out, describing his assault on Natasha O'Brien in quite macho, proud terms... Now, hold on, hold on. What does that tell us about the armed forces, or at least about his friends within the armed forces? Have I ever robbed a shop and shared it on my Facebook to say, I stole a bottle of vodka from gay spa? You know, what would that say about my friends that I could feel I could tell them about that? What does that say? That says that he considered himself to be part of a social group where this kind of behaviour is lionised. And not only that, his own superior officer who attended the court described this brutal assault on Miss O'Brien as very out of character, and in fact described Private Crotty as an exemplary member of the Irish Defence Force. Yeah, he said he was very polite. He was a well-mannered young fella. What a thing to say about someone who publicly assaulted a young woman and to beat her unconscious on the streets. What an absolutely insensitive thing to say about someone very polite. Well, it certainly wasn't polite when he was homophobically abusing two innocent men on the streets of Limerick, which is the only reason that Natasha O'Brien intervened on their behalf in a non-violent way, requesting that he stop screaming the word faggot across the street at these two men that he didn't know. And it was for this reason that she was assaulted by Crotty, not unconscious, and suffered some severe and long-term injuries. I've seen a lot of things online, various people injecting themselves into this conversation, saying that Miss O'Brien should have been minding her own business. What do you think about minding our own business when we're listening to homophobic or racist or bigoted behaviour on the street? Should we all just mind our own business? Is that the way a good society should function? Or was Natasha O'Brien being a good citizen? What are your thoughts on that? I think she was being a good citizen. I also think she was being a good ally by standing up for people who are being victimised because they may or may not be a member, or are perceived at least to be a member of a minority group, or in some way vulnerable to attack from the majority. I think that in a civilised society, we should be able to intervene appropriately when we see other people being abused. And thank God, a male bystander witnessing this brutal assault of Miss O'Brien, he himself intervened to stop Mr. Crotty going any further. And again, this is another example of a stranger standing up for someone who is under attack. Miss O'Brien stood up for people who were under attack, and Mr. Crotty attacked her as a result. And this man, who was not known to Miss O'Brien, then intervened to prevent the attack going further than it already had. Which could have been muddied up. Let's face it, she was not unconscious, this was a serious head injury, which caused a concussion. This could have easily resulted in death. And I think this thing about minding our own business is really important here. That people on the right, the law and order types, the misogynists of social media, will tell Natasha O'Brien to mind her own business, and for this other male bystander to mind his own business. Interestingly enough, Private Crotty was not minding his own business when he saw two people who he assumed, for whichever reason, were gay. What business was that of his? But no one is asking him to mind his own business. This cuts to the very heart of what people are demanding right now by free speech. I demand the right to, my free speech, and abuse people for being gay, abuse them for being immigrants or the wrong colour on the streets of Ireland. That's perfectly acceptable somehow, but free speech to say stop, it's mind your own business time. I think you're being uncharacteristically polite there, Natasha, because, let's face it, mind your own business is a very mild translation of what we've actually seen being said about Miss O'Brien. That she's a wagon, that she doesn't know her place, that she deserves what she got for trying to police this man's speech. I have seen some absolutely awful, awful insults and attacks aimed at Miss O'Brien in the aftermath of this. And I just have to say, more power to her that she's standing up, she's being counted, and if she had not made the statements that she had in the immediate aftermath of this egregious lenient sentence, then this issue would not be getting as much attention as it now is, and of course there are certain people who are not going to be happy with that. However, there is also now this extra attention on the defence forces and how it conducts itself, with questions being asked about how many serving members are currently before the court or already have convictions for serious crimes. Last week it was over 20, now it's up to 68. I saw that. Now, in any other, in any other industry, in any other workplace, if you discovered that your male colleagues had that level of conviction, that many convictions, for domestic or intimate partner violence, you would be leaving that workplace at breakneck speed. There is an Irish naval officer still serving with the Irish Navy after pleading guilty to a serious physical assault on his own partner. Of course. That is just one example of a number of very troubling statistics that are slowly easing their way out of the defence forces after repeated requests. Tell me this, tell me this, how many taxi drivers could continue after that are vetting if they had a conviction for beating their partner? Well, it would certainly create more difficulty for them in getting a public service vehicle licence. Of course it would, and that would happen if you were a teacher, this would happen if you were working for a hospital, absolutely, and quite rightly. But why is this not happening to the Irish defence forces? Why are people who are particularly violent crime, why are these, why are these being allowed to continue? I think there's a number of structural reasons, including vast under-resourcing of the Irish defences over recent years. There's also, I suppose, an ongoing macho culture that was revealed in absolutely stark terms in 2021 with Katie Hammond's excellent Women of Honour audio documentary, which the Tribunal of Inquiry into the Treatment of Women in the Irish Defence Forces, who make up 7% of the Irish Defence Forces, that Tribunal only got it underway last month, and the report that was presented to the Minister for Defence at the time, Simon Covey, recounted a horrible, horrible systemic abuse of both sexual and physical nature in the Irish Defence Forces over a period of 40 years. And that's, the people who put together that report were able to identify patterns of abuse over those decades, including reported sexual assaults taking place in barracks, mess, naval boats, swimming areas, shower facilities and abroad on tours. That advice was given to female members of the Defence Forces to maintain two locks on their cabin or bedroom doors if there has been an attempt to assault or forcibly enter their key comporters in the past. That's the solution. Girls, you just need to put an extra lock on your door if you want to serve your country. Well, let's think about what the military is and how the military in particular functions in the right-wing imagination. This is about soldiery. This is about national pride. It's about honour. It's about all of these things around which right-wing Conservatives and the far-right in particular have a gay fetish. Absolutely, and I think that's one of the reasons that Natasha O'Brien has been subject to such a greedious attack is because this man was a soldier and his role as a soldier, his career as a soldier was one of the reasons that Judge Tom O'Donnell gave for why, at the recommendation of Cottlecroft Chief Barrister, that a custodial sentence would interfere with that career. Now, if Cottlecroft had been a mobile telephone salesman, would the same argument have held water? I do not think so. No, it wouldn't have held water at all, but let's play devil's advocate right now. We've got a lot of people, especially to quote our right-wing friends at the minute, you know, these soft-on-crime lesbies, the woke errati, the woke errati right now are having a, we're having a shit set over, you know, the treatment of the army. So, okay, let's play devil's advocate. What is the army? What is the difference between, you know, the defence forces and, you know, becoming a paramedic? The defence forces, these are soldiers. Now, to think the way they are thinking, we do not want soldiers who are woke. Soldiers will be called to be in situations where they need to be as hard as nails, they need to be violent, they need to be forceful, and they need to have, let's say just a little bit sexist here, they need to have the balls to pull the trigger. Now, that means within any society that had a military and had a military tradition, and let's face it, the Irish state was founded in violence. It was founded in an armed struggle. So, this idea of the military goes right to the origins of Irish state identity. Now, of course, if we are in a society that has a military and has the sense of military or martial honour, then violence is glorified at its very core. It has to be. This is the rationale of, you know, military pride and martial glory. I come from the other islands where the history of empire and recruitment to the army, we don't want little soft boys. We don't want, you know, this is why the prejudice against, you know, gay people in the military has lasted so long. And, of course, violence and sex, as we are right now discovering in Palestine, you know, are intricately linked. If you're going to have the balls to pull the trigger, you need to dehumanise someone to a certain degree in your head. And this violence has a huge Freudian interrelationship with sexuality. It's why Israeli soldiers are holding up the panties of dead Palestinian women. This is exactly what this is about. So, it shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone that Private Grotty felt that he could do this to a woman. She needs, in his head, to be put in her place. Now, perhaps, then, we should be looking more closely at the military and asking ourselves, why do we live in a society where children are punished, put on the naughty step, given detention, given extra thumbs to do in school if they punch another student, but be recruited later into the army, where they're expected to, in a worst-case scenario, kill other human beings and get medals for it. There's no naughty step for this. Well, there are two points I would use to counter that. One is that, in military life, people place a huge emphasis on discipline. Karpovkoffy was not in uniform the night he attacked Natasha O'Brien. Karpovkoffy was not on the battlefield the night he attacked Natasha O'Brien. So, there was no discipline there in how he conducted himself. The need for a violent impetus within armed forces, when properly deployed, is what makes Ireland's contribution to peacekeeping missions around the globe so valuable. But none of that had anything to do with what happened that night in Limerick, nor should it have had anything to do with the tough processes used by Judge O'Donnell in deciding that this man's career in that armed force should be preserved at the cost of justice, not only to Miss O'Brien, but to lots of other victims of assault, who now know that if the person who abused them happens to be a member of the armed forces, they are less likely to see justice done on the day that they go to court and share with our society the impact that this attack has had on them. Why should anyone now, a victim of crime, bother giving a victim impact statement as Miss O'Brien so bravely did and as Lavinia Kerwick so courageously campaigned for decades ago? Why should anyone bother giving a victim impact statement now if the perpetrator of the crime is a member of a higher degree of humanity when it comes to how our country is structured? My second point is that today's announcement from the Irish government that there's going to be an overhaul of the structure of the defence forces with the new chief of the defence forces, a new position being created, all of this is budgetary. It's very convenient that it is being announced today in the aftermath of the public uproar about the mistreatment of Miss O'Brien by the judicial system. But when you look at the actual details of the announcement, it's a hell of a lot more about defence spending and parity of esteem across the different branches of the Irish military. And also, I would argue, based on the comments of ministers for state, Jennifer Carroll-McNeil, who has responsibility for defence in European affairs, that the statements that she made today, that it will be a framework within which Irish defence spending will be massively increased in order to lockstep with our EU partners. I think you can have any overhaul that you like and any restructuring of, you know, the Irish defence forces that you care to have. But there is a bigger problem here when we spoke about discipline, military discipline. I understand that the military in every society will attract, I believe that the military does attract good, honest people. I've met people in the armed forces in the United States, in the UK and in Ireland who are very decent, good people. Like any society, you know, we see this in the Gardaí, we see it in any institution that attracts the authoritarian, the authority figure, those who are attracted to our discipline authority. It also attracts absolute psychopaths. So basically, what we're left with is an acknowledgement that, in terms of the existence of a military, a certain willingness to do violence is required, but this needs to be combined with a great deal of discipline. That begs the question then, why the ill-disciplined are still among the ranks? Because they are needed. They are absolutely needed. A number of studies done in the aftermath of... I'm talking about, when I say ill-disciplined, I'm talking about people who have already been found guilty or are currently in court for serious crimes. What good does that do the Irish Defence Forces? I would argue very little. Publicly, it does no good. We're talking about it. It has become a national scandal. But behind the scenes, it's absolutely necessary. I'm not going to defend it because the main thrust of my attack here is a critique of why do we have these things? Why do the British have the paratroop regiment? Why do the marines exist? You know, they are there for the service of capitalist imperialism. This is the advance guard of imperial force. Now, that's my main critique of this. But while we live in a society that has it, then the military has to have the psychopaths. Because, as I was going to say, a number of studies done in the aftermath of the Korean War discovered that most American GIs in conflict, and the same was happening in Vietnam, were aiming their guns not to kill the enemy because most normal human beings don't want to know that they've killed another person. That's a natural human thing to do. They've been drafted into a conflict. They are conscripts. Conscript soldiers are famously useless in combat because only once a conflict has gone on for so long and when the sense of rage and when comrades have been killed and vengeance enters into the rank and file of the army do soldiers start aiming to kill other soldiers. In the beginning of a conflict, normal soldiers don't do this. The soldiers who do aim their guns are the ones who were torturing small animals when they were at home, before they were conscripted. So the army, if it's to exist as an institution, needs to attract a certain level of violence from society's psychopaths. And this is why, on the quiet, the Irish Defence Forces, the British Army, the US military, will give a greater degree of leniency towards violent, psychopathic and sociopathic individuals who don't typically fare well working for McDonald's or, you know, private industry, possibly banking and finance, maybe. But these are individuals who, by and large, as we see with Private Grotty, characters like him typify this. They join the military and get medals and become heroes or they end up in prison for violent crime. This is the character, this is the backbone of the army. And the army has always understood this. You know, the famous quote made by a very famous British general years ago was that his army was made up of the very scum of the earth. And we take pride in this. We put the red coats on them, we put them in uniform, we make them march and step. And discipline isn't so much for the soldier but is for the continuation of the armed forces as an institution, because the public wouldn't tolerate an army of thugs. So we put them in nice uniforms. This was understood by the Nazis. They got Hugo Boss to design the uniform to make these thugs look presentable so that these FS men were very attractive to upper-crust British ladies. This has been understood in the military for a very long time. So perhaps, rather than restructuring, perhaps we should look at why we have a military. That's entirely sure. I mean, is there an imminent French invasion? And what is this peacekeeping business? Now, I don't want to take away from people who have been on UN peacekeeping missions and have acted gallantly and brilliantly and have served Ireland well. But why aren't these peacekeepers in Tel Aviv? Why aren't these peacekeepers in Gaza? There's no peacekeepers in Gaza. There's no peacekeepers in Georgia, in the United States, looking after black communities who are being systematically murdered by a white supremacist police force. And that is a severe, violation of their human rights. This is an egregious crime. Peacekeeping, quote-unquote peacekeeping, is typified, as we have seen from the conflict in Gaza or the genocide in Gaza, how white nations, the most dominant nations of the world, control black nations and brown nations. Well, I certainly agree with that. I do think that peacekeepers are only allowed in where NATO permits them. Absolutely. And who is NATO? Exactly. And where is the United Nations headquartered? And why was it headquartered there? And why do these, you know, most dominant nations in the world have vetoes? So yes, we can say so much about the bravery of our peacekeepers, and I think more power to them. They are wonderful. However, the people who call the shots are doing this to the service of a violent imperial agenda. So I would then begin to ask that if we need armies, and if armies are really serving this agenda, we need to give psychopaths guns and discipline them like, you know, trained attack dogs. Every so often, if you take a 20 year old man at his most violent and most risk seeking, as we all know, train him how to kill and hand him a gun, give him a uniform, it shouldn't come as a surprise that that dog then mauls you. Exactly the same thing. But we're running out of time. We've only got a few minutes left before we get booted. My concern is that you are saying Natasha O'Brien had to be beaten unconscious because people like Kahlo Crafty need to exist in order for the army to exist, and therefore he doesn't need to go to prison because at the price she just has to pay. That's not what I'm saying. As I said at the beginning of that little rant, this was me playing devil's advocate. What I am saying is I would ask the question, why do we have the military in the first place? Because if we are going to follow the logic of we need a military, we need armed forces. Let's say that we need to enforce our dominance over the rest of the world and serve on peacekeeping missions that serve a US-Washington consensus agenda. Let's say that. Then we need people who are willing to pull the trigger. We need the very scum of the earth who are willing to aim to kill. They are needed. Our militaries are pointless. Well, I would say then that militaries are pointless. Yes, absolutely. I agree. That would be my conclusion. That would be the moral conclusion of that argument. If we can't tolerate this behavior and the military is only a place of enshrining it and disciplining it, then yeah, there's a much deeper question to be asked about having it in the first place. Well, that was all very serious. I know. That's the premise of the show. You say something that winds me up and I go off like a firework. Like, I think we're running out of time. We've got like a minute and 30 seconds left, so we better say goodbye. Bye-bye, boys and girls. Bye, boys and girls. Bye, Constance. Bye, Ernesto.
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