'If women’s care has been undervalued, so too have men’s physical strength and their lives'

ONE runs hostels in Dublin, Letterkenny, and Athlone, with another planned for Munster.

It also runs a large network of support centres for veterans, with several more due to open, including in Cork and in Cobh, where there will also be two apartments for veterans.

The hostel movement got going in the late 1980s after several homeless veterans died on the streets. Ten brave ex-servicemen remortgaged their houses to fund the first hostel in Dublin.

The reasons such a significant minority of ex-servicemen end up on the streets ram home the extent of the sacrifice which these men have made in serving their county.

ONE chief executive Ollie O’Connor explains that some ex-servicemen find it hard to adapt to civilian life having undergone the “behaviour modification” necessary in the Defence Forces.

You learn to follow orders which may lead to your death.

For most, that’s an astonishing thought. Many may argue that people should never follow an order that could cause them harm.

The Defence Forces can’t work any other way, though. And our Defence Forces have done a vast amount of good, whether through their 57 years of service as peace-keepers in many war zones from Lebanon to the Golan Heights, from Congo to Mali, their tireless patrolling of the Mediterranean where in recent years they have saved 18,000 lives and salvaged hundreds of bodies from the sea, or here at home where they perform duties which range from dismantling bombs to defending us from dissidents to stopping drug smugglers in our seas to making infrastructure secure after storms.

That’s before you factor in the possible impacts of Brexit.

We can’t keep our country safe and stable without our defence forces. Yet we do not take the military to our hearts.

Speaking on RTÉ radio, Minister Regina Doherty said we all had “a soft spot for the nurses”, which I found patronising, but a “soft spot” is better than the “hard spot” we have in our hearts for the Defence Forces.

In speaking about our historic lack of support for ex-servicemen, O’Connor made the point that we don’t have an imperialist history. He noted also that our State had its birth in a civil war.

Surely these facts also impact on the place which serving members of the Defence Forces have in our society? Why is our military consistently at the bottom of the pay league of public-service workers?

An Garda Síochána is at the top. In between are all other public sector workers, including teachers and, of course, nurses, who have just won a pay increase from the Labour Court. The guards are now apparently looking for the same.

The defence forces are at rock bottom when it comes to public-sector pay and a partial clue lies in the success of the nurses: The Defence Forces can’t strike and unlike the guards have never threatened to do so.

Our servicemen and women suffered the same cuts under the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest Acts from 2009, as did the nurses. This pay is slowly being restored.

However, the specific grievances they have before the Public Sector Pay Commission, which were expected to be reported on late last year, may not now be reported on before the last quarter of this year.

To compound the problem, the submission which the commission received did not come directly from the Defence Forces. The final say on what gets reported to the pay commission goes to the defence minister.

The Government gets to tell the pay commission what the Defence Forces want the Government to pay them.

It’s hard to see how they can get very far, despite Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s commitment at the recent commissioning ceremony that his Government does not take servicemen and women for granted and rather “commends those who serve this State with such loyalty and selflessness”.

Increasingly, many servicemen and women feel that “selflessness” is a luxury they and their families can’t afford.

The “recruitment crisis” in the nursing sector was the most often quoted rationale for honouring nurse’s demands in the run-up to the nurses’ strike.

A Sunday Business Post article last week disputed the INMO’s figures, showing up to six times as many applicants as nursing posts in some sectors of the health service.

Former HSE chief Tony O’Brien explained in the same newspaper that there is a recruitment crisis in some areas of nursing and not in others.

By contrast there is no confusion about the recruitment crisis in the Defence Forces, the force consistently standing at least 500 beneath the 9,500 they are meant to number.

Airforce pilots are leaving in droves; 30 have recently departed. Aldi has been attracting military personnel skilled in organisation and supply management.

Some military have joined the Garda Síochána, others have gone into private security companies.

It’s not just that the pay is too low; it’s that the pay is too low in the context of an extreme level of commitment which is unique to the Defence Forces and far exceeds that required of any other public servant.

They are liable for service 24/7. They cannot terminate their contracts when they want to and may have to buy themselves out.

They do not have much security, having fixed-term contracts and being required to retire early: From the senior ranks at age 56.

They are subject to military discipline at all times. They are frequently relocated. They suffer huge discomfort. They are frequently exposed to danger.

Among the homeless men who ONE rehouses, some were on the streets because they are haunted by the horrors of war.

In Estonia, military personnel’s pay is set 30% higher than that of other public servants because of their special circumstances.

In Ireland, the military’s special circumstances mean they get less pay than any other public servants.

Much has been made of the gendered nature of low pay for nurses, which I don’t dispute.

However, low pay for the mostly male military workforce is gendered too. In both cases, a vocation is exploited.

If women’s care has been undervalued, so too have men’s physical strength and ultimately, their lives.

That’s why in Ireland, they make up at least 67% of rough sleepers (16% were unidentified) 80% of suicides, the vast majority of workplace fatalities, and, internationally, 97% of the casualties of war.

Those ex-servicemen sleeping in Tricolour sleeping-bags were raising awareness of homelessness, not servicemen’s pay, but the issues are related: They both point to our ability to make some men expendable.