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32 DEFENCE FORCES PODCAST Overseas experience, leadership and management training, working as part of a team and personal development are some of the attractions of being a young engineer in the Defence Forces as opposed to a similar position in civilian life. That's the message in an interview with three Army engineers conducted by Capt Cian Clancy for a Defence Forces Podcast and focussed on the Army Engineers Corps Graduate Programme. Cmdt Sharon McManus told how 18 years of her 25 years in the Defence Forces were spent in the Corps of Engineers. She explained how she joined the Army in 1996 and after her Cadetship decided to study Civil Engineering in NUI Galway followed by a Masters in Sustainable Engineering in UCC. This culminated in her work in the Director of Engineers in 2012 with the Defence Forces being accredited to the International Energy Management Standard ISO 5001. Not long after that she got the opportunity to work in the European Defence Agency for a number of years, essentially leading the European Army Forces Energy and Environmental Research Strategy. Most recently Cmdt McManus has been working on a research technology and innovation feasibility study for the Defence and is currently getting ready to deploy overseas to Lebanon. Explaining the work of the Corps of Engineers, she said it had a number of different roles which could be split into different sections. "In the conventional military sense our three main roles would be mobility, counter-mobility and survivability, or force protection as we call it," she said. Mobility meant ensuring troops on the ground could move forward at all times. That included things like clearing obstacles or clearing minefields in certain conventional situations, building bridges and lines of communication. Counter mobility involved impeding others mobility using explosive demolition for example. The main "bread and butter" activity, she said, was survivability, especially in the overseas context. Looking back on her three overseas trips – to Liberia, Kosovo and Chad – Cmdt McManus said lot of that work was focussed on survivability in the camp for the troops on the ground which really meant providing the physical protection for the camp, power generation distribution and transmission, water purification, wastewater treatment, any infrastructural element and firefighting. In Ireland at home, they looked after the civilian side of By Tony O'Brien Photos provided by DF Flickr DEFENCE FORCES PODCAST ENGINEER GRADUATE PROGRAMME engineering. "We look after the facility management, the engineering and maintenance of all our barracks – essentially all our campuses - around the country. This includes project management, contracts tendering and management, engineering design and a really solutions-focussed approach to the management of our campuses," she stated. There were some cross cutting activities particularly in the sustainability area and they had a very substantive sustainability agenda, a very ambitious energy management and renewable energy programme for the Defence Forces. This also had a certain amount of societal impact. Team work, just as elsewhere in the Defence Forces, was a key component within the engineer corps. "An engineer is not the expert in terms of the technicians work and vice versa. You really have to work as a team with that kind of solutions focused approach to the challenges on the ground. Practically speaking when you find yourself in the middle of Africa, in the middle of Chad, you can't run down to a local hardware store or get a part supplied within a number of days. "You really have to innovate on the ground and the only way to do that is by using the team and by working together to find solutions to problems such as pumps breaking down and no water available for the camp. What are you going to do in that situation? So, it is really interesting, really challenging and very fulfilling when you work as a team and find solutions to those situations," she explained. Such opportunities might not arise for a conventional civilian engineer. "It is very different. I'm not sure if many engineers, particularly graduate engineers, understand the breadth of work available within the Defence Forces and the Corps 2 Members of the ESSC (Engineers Specialist Search and Clearance) team carrying out IED drills on the 62nd Inf Gp UNDOF MRE

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