Ep 1 (part one) Experiences of Living and Learning in the Irish Defence Forces: What looks good vs. What's effective?
2:03PM May 8, 2021
Speakers:
Shelli Ann Garland
Andrew Gibson
Keywords:
defence forces
uniform
people
research
irish
higher education
officers
galway
university
role
army
interviews
generally
society
military
experiences
phd
dublin
education
interested
This is part one of a two part series.
Hello, and welcome to a dash of salt. I'm Dr. Shelli Ann. And I'm so glad you're here. Whether you stumbled upon this podcast by accident, or you're here because the subject drew you in welcome. Salt is an acronym for society and learning today. This podcast was created as an outlet for inviting fresh discussions on sociology and learning theories that impact your world. Each episode includes a wide range of themes that focus on society and everyday learning, whether formal or informal. So let's get stuck in shall we.
Today, I am joined by Dr. Andrew Gibson, a friend and fellow teaching and research colleague, Andrew is wonderfully Irish and is a research fellow in the culture and academic values and education, also known as cave Research Centre at the School of Education in Trinity College Dublin, where he also lectures on educational philosophy and theory. He was a government of Ireland postgraduate research scholar for his PhD also at Trinity College. Andrew is very much interested in the questions of what underlies the simplified picture of the world presented in policies and institutional narratives. He comes at questions through a variety of perspectives, specifically sociological, historical, and philosophical. He's currently working on a number of projects, including a study of the place of LGBTQ plus identities and sexualities in Irish sex education. Welcome to a dash of salt, Andrew, I'm so glad you're here today.
Thanks for having me, Shelli. Delighted to be with you.
So we'll just dive in here straightaway, because I know you're gonna have a lot of great things to share with us. As you know, Andrew, I served in the United States Navy back in the 1990s as an SK or a storekeeper in supply management. Back then, the US offered a buy in scholarship programme for all enlisted servicemen and women, and it was called the Montgomery GI Bill. The Montgomery GI bill provides education benefits to active duty veterans and reservists for up to 36 months for college vocational, technical and other training and work preparation programmes if you contributed $100 per month for 12 months, and you served a minimum of two years with certain restrictions. So paid higher education tuition for military service members has dramatically changed over the last 30 years. And your research on the lived experiences of officers in the Irish defence forces with civilian higher education in the Irish context, is a very intriguing topic. So firstly, can you tell us a little bit about your research?
So my PhD research was focused specifically, as you're saying there on Irish Defence Forces officers who started attending university in the late 1960s 1969, when they started? So what I was interested in was some of the basic things that you would ask when you hear something like that, why did they start sending Irish officers to university? What were they doing? What were their experiences like? And so that's, you know, the broad strokes of what the actual PhD itself is about. I can tell you a little bit of how about how I came to that, which is, it's kind of unusual in Ireland to have that much of a connection with the military. Because we don't have a large defence establishment. The Irish Defence Forces is going to get the numbers you just ballpark at the moment, but you're talking about 11,000 10,000 active personnel in the permanent Defence Forces. So it's, you know, it's not a big part of Irish life. But where I grew up, was outside the Curragh. Outside Newbridge in County Kildare. There, and that's a big army area, that's where the Defence Forces Training Centre is. And going back before that, it was a big British Army. military establishment as well. Newbridge was an arm a British army town. And so I would have had family connections to that in school, parents of friends would have been in the army. So it was the air I breathed when I was growing up effectively. And then when I moved out of Kildare, I started to realise, oh, that's not everyone else's experience. People don't walk down town in their local village. see an APC passing by, or they don't see active duty personnel walking around in full uniforms, or they don't see the army coming in collecting wages from the bank with armed personnel standing outside. So for me, I was starting to come to my connection with this area, through kind of cognitive dissonance when I was talking to other people about how I grew up and what my background was, and the fact I'd been in our reserves as well, when I was younger, our Army Reserves, most people didn't have that experience. So that kind of spurred me to look into this a bit deeper and go, Okay, this isn't everyone's usual experience. Maybe there's something in this
is this something that you have always wanted to research and be a part of, or did this culminate over time then.
But this is where I say this is the PhD topic I started out with. So I started in research, and I started doing research before I started doing the PhD. So I was working in Dublin Institute of Technology as was then known, working with Professor Ellen Hazelcorn, who I still work with today. And I started working in di t in the depths of the recession, I got a job bridge internship, to start working in big data for a few months. And Dr. Hazelcorn, who a professor Hazelcorn was working with, realised I was interested in a whole variety of different areas in higher education higher she was the director of research and enterprise for di t at looking at, you know, their their institutions research and how that should be organised. But she herself also researched higher education. So from working with her, she asked me to get involved in some projects. And that started me on my roads to researching in the area of higher education. Now, while I was working for her, I, I subsequently became a senior research assistant working with her in her research centre, working on areas of her her areas of interest, such as university rankings, that was a big thing. And also Arts and Humanities Research impact. And her view was, if you're going to be working on this stuff, as a research assistant, you should probably be doing some research yourself because you're well capable of it. So she was encouraging me to do a PhD, and get stuck in. I had done my Masters already in history previously, in Trinity. My interest had been originally back in those days to go the route of the literary scholar, I was interested in doing a PhD in 17th century English poetry. And that, you know, things happened in 2008, to about 2010. That caused me to reevaluate that. But when I was thinking about doing a PhD, again, it was making this connection between what am I actually doing in my work? And plus, you know, what could I do with that? What could be a future career route, so I started researching private higher education in Ireland. So this is an area that does not get an awful lot of attention. It's not an area that is covered in any real way in terms of accountability or oversight in terms of government policies, government organisations, let's see the kinds of organisations that look after research for public institutions just don't have any interactions of private higher education. I was kind of interested in this. So I started working on that went part time working with Professor Hazelcorn, and started full time in Trinity. I got funding and Trinity to start the PhD. And I was working on that, and that was fine. I went to you know, I was still doing my research with Ellen Hazelcorn, working on various projects, going to summer schools in different places. And there was one specific summer school I'll tell you about where I was working with the Centre for global higher education, which is based in University College London. And I was talking to a professor there was going to be doing a workshop with us on phenomenography, I happen to remember, it was Paul Ashman and I was having a chat with him, and he was asking me, you know, how is your research going on you? You're doing this private higher education, research, how are you getting on? I kind of rolled my eyes and like, Alright, you know, it's grand, it's fine. I've done my lit review. I'm going to start doing the interviews soon, you know, I'm just going to get it done and move on. And he was not terribly impressed by this response to the my research topic, and before he was like, that's great. Andrew, thanks very much. And then before he started the workshop, he basically started with a kind of a pep talk on a bit of a a bit of words of warning to to Andrew Gibson sitting in the audience, and he said, You shouldn't be going into research on your project expecting, you know, you know what you're going to find. And it'll be, you'll just get it done and you move on with us. And that's not the right attitude to have for this. And if that is the attitude you have towards your research and your research project, if it is just something you're doing, you're ticking the box and you move on your life. Maybe that's not what you should be doing. Not necessarily saying, you know, maybe you shouldn't be doing a PhD, but he was saying, Is this what you should be doing? And so that, I dwelt with that for a while, and I met a good friend of mine, Deirdre Troy. And we had a conversation that evening, and she asked me, How are you getting on with your research? I kind of said the same thing. And she said, No, Andrew, there's Okay, we're gonna open this bottle of wine over there. We're going to discuss this, you're going to tell me what's going on with your research. And I said the same thing again. And we had a big conversation. She said, if this is the you're not enjoying this topic, what would you enjoy? What would you like doing. And I had this other idea in the back of my mind, which was looking at the Irish defence forces on higher education, I said, this sounds kind of cool. I'm really interested in this. It speaks to my background, it's about my family. It's about my time when I was in the reserves. When I was younger, I was interested in going into the cadets, before my eyesight got very bad. And I realised that wasn't going to happen for me. And she said, well focus on that, maybe, you know, use that get through the PhD, and then use that as your as your postdoc project. So came back from London, back in Dublin back when we used to be able to get on planes and fly places. And I sat down one evening, and I got out of a blank piece of paper. And I said, right, I'm gonna drive what I can use for my current project that I've worked on, and what can I recycle, and use if I was to focus on this? drew that out, made an appointment to meet my PhD supervisor, dr. john Walsh, and had a sit down chat with him. I said, I want to change my my topic. And he said, Okay, well, that's great. You're only you're only a year in Sure. And I said, john, I'm two years in, keep up. And he said, okay, to your two years in, well, you know, this is still doable, this is still manageable. How are you going to do it? So that was great. He, you know, he saw I was serious about it. And he said, right, okay, go for it. If you're working on a project you're really not enjoying, you're not going to stick with us, or you're going to find difficulty sticking with it, maybe you will stick with it. But he was of the same mind as, as Deirdre and myself in thinking No, if I'm going to be doing this, and this is going to be a big, serious piece of work that I'm going to spend the majority of the next few years of my life working on, it needs to be meaningful.
Now that you've given us a little bit of background. Tell us more about the topic of your research and the concepts that you explored as part of your research.
Yes, so I suppose the easiest way to break down what the topic was about and how I wrote it is, is the title. So the title of the finished piece of work that I wrote is called socialisation role, period, infra politics, officers of the Irish Defence Forces and civilian higher education since the 1960s. A lot to get in there. But that's what a PhD thesis title is all about. So the three main things there are socialisation, role theory and infrapolitics. So I work through each of those in turn socialisation. For people who have you know, a background in sociology, it's reasonably straightforward. And this is the concept of the various processes of making people join society in certain ways. So, primary socialisation, when you're a child, you're socialised. To become a certain gender. You're socialised. Within your age. You are the youngest in the family. You're socialised as a daughter or a son or whatever. So that's the initial, you know, the entrance that a human being makes into human society, that's their primary socialisation. And the aspect of this that this is covering is that whole notion of secondary socialisation. So that's an education that's among peers, that's any variety of scenes and settings where secondary socialisation can take place. This is what I was looking at. I was looking at the defence forces as a place where a form of secondary socialisation takes place. If I was to break that down a little bit further, you know, you can break it down into these officers who I'm dealing with they enter the cadet school and the cadet school is a kind of a typical total institution. They're enclosed. They're in uniforms. They're subjects to the rules of their commanding officers. They don't get to just go off into town for a coffee if they choose to. They're living incredibly regimented lives and that is part of the entire process to socialise them into the organisation and all to socialise them in their identity as military officers. And people can think of multiple different kinds of analogies for that as well. You know, if someone becomes a religious person, if they join a monastery, you know, there's all these kinds of things, processes and events that bring you into that whole system of socialisation. So that was one thing I was I was definitely interested looking at. But the other thing that emerged from this, and that came from part of my conceptual framework that we talked about later is, do you want official forms of socialisation that occurred so the stuff that was not intentional, and, and that was where some really, really interesting conversations happened in the interviews that I was doing with with retired and serving personnel about how they were unofficially socialised into the culture of the defence forces into the culture of being an Air Corps officer or into the culture of being a cavalry officer. And I can talk about that, I suppose, in due course, role theory, role theory is a paper that another paper wrote here is a concept that has gone as a fashion in in recent years in many ways. And I can testify to how out of fashion, it's gone by the multiple series of reviews I just had on a recent paper that finally got accepted. But it was looking at this concept of role. And this is related to socialisation. So you're socialised into an identity. But you can also say you're socialised into a role. So a person has multiple roles, you can have a role as a son, you can have a role as a husband, you can have a role as a mentor, but there's kind of official occupational roles as well. And that's what I was interested in those occupational roles of the officer. And so I was using role theory in a kind of structural functionalist strain of role theory, looking at how do people enter into these roles of being an officer. So socialisation role theory kind of being used quite close closely with one another kind of feeding into one another. And the other side of worldview, I suppose that it was using is the stuff coming from Berger and Lookman and Goffman and that kind of more symbolic interactionist view of the role.
So I kind of, to start looking at role theory, I'd read as widely as I could, and then I just decided I'm going to be agnostic, I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to find. But I read enough of these things to hopefully be able to identify what happens when I come across it. And then the third one, then is infrapolitics. And we may have to go into a bit more detail with that. But I quick sketch is just it's an idea that comes from James C. Scott, who's a political anthropologist, his area of research was in Southeast Asia. And infrapolitics, is his way of looking at how peasant societies operate. So he's specifically looking at peasant societies. That's how we started. And from that, then he started looking at how these forms of what he calls infrapolitics are found in societies all around the world, and how they operate.
Okay, so we have a lot to kind of tease out there and definitely to find out. That's, that's a new concept for me in politics. So I definitely want to hear more about that. But one of the things I know about your research is that you looked at it over sort of a 50 year period. Is that about right? Six from the 1960s? Is that correct? Yeah, it's so it made me think of, I don't know, if you're familiar with on life course theory, or the life course perspective, but it is what I actually did my research on. And it's a framework for examining people's lives and life histories. And it investigates that, like the structural, the social, and the cultural context, and the social change through a series of, you know, those socially defined events and rules that we and we as individuals and enact over over our lifetime. And your research really resonated with, with this understanding for me, especially because it focuses on that, and civilian higher education over the 50 years. And, and so I want to talk a little bit and unpack, you know, what that means for what you were talking about military personnel who are very, you know, stringent and have, you know, absolute rules and regulations that they must follow, and how civilian education played, you know, what kind of role that played in it. So my first question to you there would be can you talk to me a little bit about the place of the Irish utilitarian society here in Ireland?
Yeah, I can. and one way of doing that, I suppose is to related to what you were saying there about, life course theory, which was something that had been raised At one stage with me about, have you considered Andrew maybe doing this? And the this is part of my continuation? And I said, Yes, I've obviously considered that I've also considered, I have two years to get this done. So unfortunately, I didn't have the opportunity, you know, which I really would have enjoyed to have multiple interviews with people to tease out these things. But what I did take from lifecourse theory, when I was looking at this was looking at not just when these people decided to enter the Defence Forces. So watch the first few questions that I was asking. We're setting the scene and letting them say for themselves, what it was that drew them to the Defence Forces. So there's questions at the start, that I would put under the heading of kind of anticipatory socialisation was predisposing these people towards a military life. And for most of them, it was kind of similar to myself, they had grown up in some kind of military miliar. Or there was something that was related to that. So let's say maybe it was, if they wanted to get involved in the Navy, in due course, the naval service, they were in the sea scouts. The big thing that those come across is the correlation between being involved in the Boy Scouts. And then from that getting involved in the what was originally the force, the cost of the Archer, the FCA, that is now the reserve Defence Forces, and then from the reserve defence forces into the cadets, you know, that is a common rules across a lot of people. And I was the same, I was a boy scout, and then I was in the reserves. And then I didn't go any further than that. But I recognised what they were what they were saying, when they were talking about this, and they were talking about, they were from an army town, or an uncle had been in the FCA during the emergency or another uncle, had been in the army, or something like this. And so that's just the one thing I would say that these people I'm not sure how common these kinds of experiences are. So this is the question about what's the place of the millet Irish military in society. When I would describe this project to people, it you know, how we describe it in the in the thesis is that there's kind of a low level ignorance, and I'm using ignorance in a descriptive sense, there, I'm not using it in any kind of a normative or judgmental way. There's just a general ignorance of the Irish Defence Forces of what they are and what they do. And there's some standard questions would be, what is the army? What do they do? Where are they, we see the maybe occasion the St. Patrick's Day parades, you know, and, but they wouldn't really have any notion of of what their activities are, they might see something like peacekeeping, perhaps on the news occasionally at Christmas, you know, peacekeepers based in Lebanon, or Mali currently, or wherever it may be. But there will generally be a kind of no kind between ignorance and indifference towards the Defence Forces, because people wouldn't generally understand what they are what they do. And, and that is one thing that did come across in the interviews later on.
So there would be a lack of recognition like they wouldn't be easily, again, from the US perspective, my perspective coming. If you saw somebody in military uniform, you knew straight away what branch that was in generally, even if you didn't have a lot of experience with the military, you knew that that was a military servicemen. And so I feel like what I'm getting from you is just that there's there would be sort of, they wouldn't be well represented in the larger society, as far as, you know, knowing who they were if they were walking down the street in uniform or that kind of thing. Is that what I'm getting from you?
Like, I'm sure if someone saw someone walking down the street on a green uniform, that have a notion that they might be, you know, military in some way it's but I think it's very, it's very, very site specific. So you know, there are army barracks dotted around Dublin there, the old British army barracks, kind of that circle Dublin in a way to make sure the Irish didn't get out of control. And lots of those barracks are still operational. So one of them in wrath mines, I used to work and do it in rock mines. And at lunchtime, you'd go to Spar, and you'd be getting your salad, whatever it is, and there'd be soldiers in the queue behind you, because there's an army barracks there. And they were just a part of Rathmines the same way everyone else is the same way the students from St. Mary's school were a part of Rathmines. On other parts of the city as well, it'd be the same thing the people in that immediately immediate environment. You know, when they're leaving the barracks, they're in uniform, just to go down to the shops or whatever. But when they're leaving the barracks to go into wider society, they would they would change into civilians. And That would generally be the way it were, it was the same thing when I was growing up in in Kildare as well. Someone might be in uniform in the car or would definitely be in uniform walking around the Curragh camp. If they come into Newbridge, generally, they would tend to take the uniform off. So they wouldn't necessarily be walking on the uniform, perhaps, if they were driving from the barracks home, they had to pick up some shop, some shopping, they might go in, but they wouldn't be going in necessarily in in the full DPM, sorry, the camouflage, they might have a, you know, a fleece on and then the camouflage combat bottoms and, you know, their their work boots. And so that's it, it's kind of it's a visual, you know, this is kind of the part of the thing is that there's so few relative to the population, and it's so site specific, and that it's not something that is generally well known about in our society.
Okay, so, um, I guess what, what that brings to mind for me is this idea of, again, you know, if we were to compare sort of the US military, and active duty, where you know, that, you know, military service, men and women are, are serving on bases, you know, that they do go off base, they usually often go off base in their outside of their uniforms. And so, you know, they have sort of that differentiation between who they are on the base and who they are, you know, when they leave the base. But it sounds to me like, because, like you were saying that these areas are peppered across Ireland? Um, I guess I start with, I'm starting to think about their integration into their higher education and, and how this comes about, and if if who they are in their role, as many of you know, military servicemen and women, if does this affect their place in their in Irish higher education? in civilian education?
Yeah, that's that's a really interesting question. Because this, this is interesting, because the approach I took in some ways as almost, you know, a qualitative longitudinal study, in some ways, because I was interviewing personnel who had retired, who have now retired, but who, who had gone to university in 1969, on 1970. So when they're talking about their experiences, that's quite different to the experience of those who I was interviewing, who are currently serving and currently in college. So I just give a quick contrast between the two of them. And one of my earliest interviews was with a retired officer, and he was talking about his when he went down to Galway as it was. So this is where they studied. First of all, this is one point to note that when Irish officers were attending university, the first ones to go were the army officers. And it was only in later years that naval service personnel and some Air Corps personnel started attending university. But it was army officers at the start. And they were going down to study in as it was, then University College Galway. Now one of the reasons they were sent to University College Galway was because goway was the Irish language University, an Irish military officer training was conducted through the medium of Irish. So the view was, we will have, you know, these Irish speaking officers will go down to this Irish speaking college. And we're going to maintain that there'll be consistency. So one of these officers who was talking to, he went and he studied star, which is Irish history, through the medium of Irish show, starving the Irish for history. That's what he was studying down in Galway. And when I was talking to him about his experiences, he was careful to emphasise the fact that they weren't really that unusual on campus, because they said was we weren't the only people in uniform on campus. I looked askance at him when he said this. And he said, there was nuns, and there was priests, you know, in quite a large proportion. So we were someone else in another kind of uniform, we were another kind of role in the language that I would use of my thesis. So that made it seem slightly less unusual in many ways, like, higher education was not very common at this stage. And in the late 60s, early 70s. We didn't get free secondary education free, sorry, we didn't get free third level education until the late 90s. So Irish higher education was still in marking trials terms. It was still elite, it was still a very small proportion of the population going to university. And if people looked around on campus, and you were there, you belonged there because you were there effectively. The experience starts to change then, as more people start attending university and the numbers expand You'll see a change then with perhaps there are fewer religious attending university as well. So you get a shift over time, whereby they are a much smaller proportion of the overall student population. So the first officers to go down, they were going down to university 1969 1970s. And they were obliged because of military discipline, because of the military regulations or regulations, they are expensive versus to attend university in uniform. And they did. Part of what happened by them doing that was in the terms of multiple interviewees, they became a known entity in Galway, so people would see them on because they're the, they're the army lads, or the army guys or the army boys. And it was all men at the stage, because it was still an all male institution, up until the 1980s. That's when the Defence Forces became integrated in that sense.
So they were walking around Galway city, and they would be seen in the uniform, and they would have been recognisable, and for people who weren't from Galway, they were kind of a novelty. So some of them are talking about a store be tourists from America was the instance they would usually give. And because at that stage in the 1980s, most of the tourists coming to our stage would have been, you know from the US, and it asked pose for for photos and whatever. And they generally wouldn't be that noticeable though the Irish people kind of wouldn't be staring at them or goal can because there were no one entity goal, there'll be certain things that they might do that will be viewed as unusual. So if a funeral cortege passed, they would stand to attention. And this was something that some officers said, that's what they were expected to do when they're in uniform, they behave in certain ways. And that kind of stuff will be noticeable. But over time, what happened as more people started attending higher education, the view of officers attending university was do I want to be wearing this uniform all the time? Do I want to be that identifiably military all the time, all the time. So that's what started to change. So originally, they arrived. They were quite unusual. But then fairly quickly, people got used to these guys walking around in a uniform. But then that started to change over time.
And so now, today, when they're off to, you know, to study, and that, you know, the higher education rounded, firstly, do they still have to go to just Galway? Or are they able to go to any of the universities here in Ireland? And to are they now able to just integrate as in their civilian attire and that type of thing?
And so in terms of the first question, does it have to be Galway, Galway is the first destination still. So if you enter into the cadets as a trainee officer, and you don't have a higher education, there's two strings you can enter with a higher education already with a degree already or without. If you don't have one. You can attend university you fill out the CAO form the same way any other school leaver would, and generally you'll be going to go away. Some people have been able to make the argument that I want to study physical education, let's say and then they might go to University of Limerick. And other instances would be perhaps Air Corps officers who are based in the Baldonnal that's where they're the Air Corps headquarters is in Baldonnal, which just outside Dublin, they would go to higher education institutions in Dublin itself. So they're, they're closer to it. But generally, yes, it would still be going away. The second question is where stuff gets a little sensitive. So I was interviewing people from all across all different stages of their careers, some still serving some retired. And what was emphasised to me by the lot of em was whatever they do, they're doing very well. When they're attending university, they're attending their lectures, they're performing well in their examinations. And that is their, that's their primary goal. That is their primary aim. The reason I say that is because there's kind of a difference of view of what looks good, and what's effective. The view of some of the officers I interviewed was, maybe by the powers that be within the army, or in the Defence Force, wherever made maybe in their view, it would look good, if we were in our uniform, we're required to do this. we're required to go around in our uniform all day, every day in college. That's what they would like. The view of some interviewees was that gets in the way of us being effective that gets in the way of us having a good educational experience. Do all of them wear the uniform? No. Some of them said this to me quite clearly, even they were saying, when they were at university, they didn't wear the uniform. And anyone who tells you that wear the uniform all the time is lying. And this is perhaps where we get into I think about infra politics and jus course and the hidden curriculum. And one person who I was interviewing, who at the time would have been in university, I said, you know, it's one of those kind of follow up questions, and you wear the uniform all the time. And he was able to quote the paragraph from the Defence Forces regulations, which stipulated watch, he was supposed to wear where he was supposed to wear it. And I said, after you finished that paragraph, I said, and you're happy with having said that, that's all you want to say? And he said, Yes, I'm perfectly happy that that's what I said. I was like, Okay, great. I don't need to know explicitly where someone that even the fact that he quoted a regulation, I mean, that told me something I needed to know. Yeah. Whereas other people would go, this is confidential, right? And I would go, what, yeah, and you've signed the form for that. And your identities go to protected all the rest. And so you know, that's, that's the kind of it is, maybe outside the Defence Forces, this would seem like I shouldn't be like, what's the big deal, but this is a defence versus regulation. So it is it is it is sensitive. But what one thing I will say, though, about this, and this is kind of related, because we're talking about the army a lot. And there was a naval, I was interviewing a couple of naval service personnel. And they were talking about us when one of them specifically was talking about when he was in college, in Galway in the 1990s. And this is where, you know, the notion that the army was a known entity and goway started to operate against him. And this is where, you know, branch pride came out, because people knew who the army was, they could recognise the green and go away. But he was naval service, they wore Navy. And he found himself being stopped by students, assuming he was campus security. And he had to go, sorry, no, I'm not campus security, I can't help you. And people who repeatedly this would happen to him. And he would just have to tell people, listen, I'm sorry, I can't help you find your bike, that very sad that it's lost. But that is not what I do. I'm sorry, I'd have to walk on. So even when we're talking about the Defence Forces, you know, even that, you have to break that down. Again, I'd recognise that there's different experiences across Army Air Corps, naval service, you know,
and I imagined that that must have been hard for, for them to go through that feeling like, you know, I'm just a student, just like you are, you know, this is what I'm here for, to be a student just like you are, but then to be put into that situation where, you know, where they are missing, you know, misrepresented. And you know, how they handle that. So that's a really interesting, anecdotal story that you share there. And one that I'm sure a lot of people could identify with, you know, sort of that misunderstanding, you know, and just wanting to be able to fit in and, you know, attend, attend their study, attend to their studies, just like every other student in that way. So,
if there's just another story, I can tell you as well, because there's just so many of these wonderful, wonderful stories, but came as, like doing this for you certainly was an absolute pleasure at times. So some quite difficult stories, as generally happens when you're doing, you know, qualitative research, but what some of them were just fantastic. And one, one person was telling me that, you know, the uniform for him wasn't an impediment. He was studying a course that not everyone else was doing. He was in Galway, but he wasn't based in Galway University and was sitting in a lecture theatre a few years older than all of the other students. And because they generally would be they've had two years of military training after they leave school. And then they're there. So he was sitting, he went in, and he went down, sat close to the front row, on his own, and lots of students sitting way up in the back. And he said, someone actually came in, walked down to his role, sat right beside him and said, well, you're a bit different to everyone else, aren't you? And it was an icebreaker, the fact that he was there in uniform, and it was kind of it was something to connect over. So you know, that's just the thing wasn't necessarily always an impediment. And this interviewee I was speaking to, he said, This guy is still one of my best friends in my life. And we met because I was in the uniform. So that was a real benefit. But the other side of it, I will say is that those who maybe were less comfortable wearing the uniform and some really, really interesting stories, like one story that came across was someone who was studying managed to get through two years of his classmates, not knowing he was in the Defence Forces. And then there was an official, not an official, but there was a formal ball for his course, that is put on for all of the years, and it's run by one of the students, societies and people turn up in, in a tux on a lovely Guna, or whatever it is, as an officer, you're obliged to turn up in your form of your formal uniform. And he did. And how he described us was that it was like something from you know, a Henry James novel, you know that a debutante coming down the stairs, it was effectively a coming out. And he walked in in his uniform, and heads turned like this was Pygmalion or something. And, and nobody knew that this person was in the army. And it was a topic of conversation for the nice. And we didn't know. But he said their response was it was genuine curiosity. It was so what do you do? What's involved? What is your life? Like? What are you going to be doing after this course that you're studying? How does that feed in? It was pure curiosity. And that speaks to the what I was saying earlier on the ignorance that exists, that people just don't know about the Defence Forces. The fact that people don't know about something doesn't mean that they fear it or they oppose it or anything like that. This is an opportunity for them to find out about others. And as he said, as well, it didn't hurt that he he did get a few pints both from as well off the bat of that for people were thanking him for his service, said that to me, he used that phrase, I said, Really? They were thanking us like, yeah, isn't that mad? They were thanking me for my service. And that again, that's a testament to maybe the the unusual position that the Irish Defence Forces have in our society that he was surprised by that he was shocked by that. And he was really quite chuffed by that as well, though, you know.
This concludes part one of my discussion with Dr. Andrew Gibson. But there's so much more here to discover. Please join us for part two when we go deep into a discussion of enpro politics, hidden transcripts, and a continuing discussion of the lived experiences of the Irish Defence Forces personnel in civilian higher education in a way that only Dr. Gibson can tell. Join us again, on the next edition of a dash of salt