An Cosantóir

34 of experiences that you get along the way," Cmdt McManus added. Capt Brian Coughlan talked about his 17 years' service with the Defence Forces, the last 10 of which have been with the Corps of Engineers. He said he studied Civil Engineering in NUIG and in 2020 finished a Masters in Engineering Management in UCD. He served as a Platoon Commander in the Curragh and as an instructor in the School of Military Engineering. His most recent appointment was as a Staff Officer in the engineer branch of the Defence Forces headquarters where he looked after combat engineering and overseas operations. He has had three overseas tours of duty – one in the Golan Heights and two in Lebanon. Talking about the course programme, he said the first 17 month of the Cadetship was exactly the same as any Cadet entering the Defence Forces. But at the end of that the Cadet will join the Corps of Engineers. "We are looking at development of military fundamentals, your leadership training and development of you as an individual at that stage to become an officer in the Defence Forces. You then move on to the Young Officers Course, now known as Masters in Military Engineering Management. This programme is 15 months in duration and covers all of your basic military engineering skills plus your project management, energy management and other areas of infrastructural management within the Corps of Engineers." Capt Coughlan added: "What we are trying to do here is build on the fundamental building blocks that you have learned in your Cadetship in terms of your leadership, your development and how do you lead engineering groups both at home – in aid to the civil authorities – or alternatively on United Nations missions overseas. Following on that you will be deployed to a unit in Ireland and again you will gather more fundamental leadership traits from leading operations. "So, it might be engineers specialist search missions, it might be development of infrastructural projects within a barracks. Then the final and culminating point of the programme which we would expect will happen between year or five is your overseas deployment with the United Nations which really for all engineer officers and all officers in the Defence Forces really a career highlight and really puts into practice everything you have learned. These are the skills and the traits that you can develop within the Defence Forces which you don't get outside in many engineering consultancies or within production facilities. "Really it is a fundamental building block that you can then carry forward in your career within the Defence Forces or if at the end of your five years you decide to leave the Defence Forces you now have a leadership skill set and a trait that you can take on and you know develop your own management role within external organizations if that's the path you so choose at the end of the five years. " He accepted that the Young Officers Course was robust and wasn't for everyone. However, if after the initial period a person decided this life wasn't for them, they could take a step back and leave the Defence Forces. "Ideally we would like that everybody would see out the five years, but we do have instances where people would join and for various reasons, personal professional or otherwise, decide to move on and again we would wish them well in their endeavours outside of the organisation." Talking about the course, Capt Coughlan said that on the combat engineering aspect, the young officers are taught about the fundamental building blocks and developing on from their Cadetship so that they leading teams in terms of building bridges, conducting explosive demolitions, engineer specialist search and clearance operations which might be clearing minefields in the Golan Heights in Syria or clearing routes in Lebanon or, alternatively, blowing up explosive remnants of war in the likes of uh Liberia or Chad "What we're trying to do is we're training you for all of the likely scenarios that you will face as an engineer platoon commander," he said adding: "We build on those blocks and it's very incremental, very decision focused. Really what we're trying to do is push the engineer officer into a situation where they are going to have to make decisions and going to have to develop their leadership traits. You will have to assess the mission that's been given to you, you'll have to analyse what sort of task is responsible for what assets you have available to you, what time constraints you have available and then you have to come up with your plan, develop it and manage it and lead it from start to finish. "If we consider something like commanding a fire crew or developing that sort of role it's not an everyday opportunity that other engineers get but it's something that we must focus on because it's one of our primary tasks overseas and again the responsibility stands with the engineer the officer, there's no one there to hold your hand. It has to be The ESSC (Engineers Specialist Search and Clearance) robot pictured here from the front awaits its deployment on an ESSC display in Casement Aerodrome Baldonnell back in 2019 DEFENCE FORCES PODCAST

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