COUNTY VIEW: The perils of the blue beret brought home in Castlebar veteran's book

Whatever naïve ideas we may have held about the respected status of peacekeeping forces in the conflict zones of the world have been well shattered by events in south Lebanon over the past month.
The reality of Irish peacekeepers being directly fired on by Israeli tanks, with the obvious intention of intimidating them into evacuating the region, is something we would have once found hard to comprehend.
But warfare is warfare. And combatants – and most especially the Israelis – care little about world condemnation or censure. The end justifies the means, and those caught in the crossfire, however noble their motivation might be, are shown little sympathy or understanding.
There has never been any love lost between Israel and United Nations peacekeeping missions, but the recent direct campaign of intimidation has surely brought the ill feeling to a new level. UN bases along the Blue Line (the de facto border between Israel and Lebanon) have been deliberately encircled by Israeli tanks, leaving Irish troops trapped between the IDF and the equally belligerent Hezbollah.
But the cavalier attitude, bordering on contempt, of Israeli officers to UN peacekeepers in Lebanon is nothing new. Those who attended the launch in Castlebar last week of Kevin McDonald’s ‘A Life Less Ordinary’ would have heard a frontliner’s inside account of what it was like to have served in that conflict. McDonald, a Castlebar man, had done four tours of duty as a senior officer under the aegis of the UN in Lebanon, but the fourth and final time provided no more hope than did the first baptism of fire.
That first tour of duty was in 1984, when south Lebanon was in the hands of Israeli-backed militias (a rag tag army of ill trained and undisciplined thugs, in McDonald’s words) who regularly turned their guns – either deliberately or through sheer incompetence – on Irish peacekeeping bases. The repeated violations of agreed ground rules led to protests from the UN to the Israeli Government, but all to no effect.
In 1996, McDonald was back again in the Lebanon to find that the deadly war between Hezbollah and Israel had not come any closer to a conclusion, except that now, hundreds of thousands of civilians were caught up in the conflict with no hope of escape. In what we see today replicated in Gaza, the Israeli Defence Forces persisted, in spite of universal outrage, in launching missiles and artillery shells directly into UN positions. One of the most egregious attacks was on the HQ of the Fijian battalion, killing 102 Lebanese civilians taking shelter there.
And for Kevin McDonald, a particularly traumatic daily duty was to conduct a foot patrol on a small dirt road where, seven years earlier, Ballinrobe native Corporal Fintan Heneghan and two Irish colleagues were killed when their lorry drove over a landmine. The deadly bomb had been placed there by Hezbollah and, according to McDonald, had been positioned deliberately to target Irish troops.
(That particular tragedy had its sequel when, 20 years later, an official report concluded that the landmine that killed Corporal Heneghan, Private Thomas Walsh and Private Mannix Armstrong should have been detected before its detonation. The road had not been swept for mines before the men were sent out on patrol in spite of prior advice of the danger. Following a lengthy campaign by the families of all three, the Government admitted that the Department of Defence and the UN had failed in the duty to carry out an adequate threat assessment before the incident.)
If there are lessons from Ireland’s long record of peacekeeping with the UN, it is that respect for the wearers of the blue beret often falls short of what we at home think it to be. And those who bravely put themselves in danger can expect little by way of deference or regard.