Originally posted by Buck
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He goes on to say that "the army can't defend against anything", which is nonsense, people like him seem to think we need an army large enough to repel an attack from the americans for it to be worthwhile or something.
Then he goes onto say that all the oversea's mission are unnecessary. Then when the host says "what about humanitarian missions?" he stops as if he doesn't know what he means or he's never heard the word "humanitarian" in his life and basically goes onto to say thats ok! Thats the main type of mission the DF would be involved in anyways!
And most of the other guests seem to be ex-Air Corps and they just went on about the abuse of ministerial transport which isn't the fault of the DF at all.
The host did seem to be a tad biased against the DF. Every person who called in who mentioned the word "overseas" he'd just say "well that's over now!" as if the DF are never going to be involved in an oversea's mission ever again.
One caller says that it would be used to defend against armed threat and civil unrest and so the host says "what civil unrest? when have the army ever been needed to respond to an armed threat?". Has he not thought of the fact that the IRA only disarmed just over 10 years ago? People are already in a frame of mind of saying to themselves "well.......the IRA are gone......guess we don't need the army anymore! sell it off!" which is ridiculous. The army may have not been called out often but has it occurred to anyone that their mere presence is a deterrent to violence? The fact that they were not called showed that they were being effective, as no one would risk the chance of the army being called in on them. I bet that if the army wasn't there then there would have been HUGE escalation in violence in the south during the troubles. And all the many call outs then would have been ignored because there wouldn't have been an army there to respond!
He also over stated the fact that the DF brought in private contractors to cut the grass as well, and really over emphasized the use of saying that it was for health and safety reasons, almost completely ignoring the fact that one of the callers told him that it was brought in as a cost effective measure because the fella's cutting the grass were taken away from jobs they could be doing that their actually trained for. Those air-corps technicians could have been doing their normal duties instead of cutting the grass, same goes for the lads in the Curragh and anywhere else. Hiring it out to a private contractor seems like a better and more cost effective idea.
Instead of all this hassle with ill-informed people calling in spreading mis-information, what they should do is just have a well informed representative of the Defence Forces to come on and people can call up and ask him questions. Less fuss, less mis-information, straighter and more accurate answers, better public opinion of the DF as they took the time to talk to them and it would probably result in much higher public support. And of course public support could in the future result in a bigger budget as the public may be more interested in expanding DF's capabilities as well as making it more cost effective, if they are better informed.
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