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35 quite a pressurised situation and you have to develop quite quickly but we believe that having come through a four-year engineering degree, having come through your cadetship and then being put in this position within the Master's programme that you can develop and lead from there." One of the highlights for a student on the course, he said, was a module where they do a dry run of a camp construction overseas. "So again you're given a task where you're deployed to a sub-Saharan African country and you have to plan out where is your water purification system going to go; how are you going to plum it, how are you going to manage it, where your electrical services system is going to go, where your camps, where your accommodation units, all of these elements and again it's something that we have done for real whether it's our deployments in Lebanon, in Chad, in Liberia. Again the first people on the ground are the engineer officers." That is all covered in the first nine months of the programme. The second six months is more around professional qualifications and development as an engineer "so it's your project management qualifications, energy management qualifications, development of construction tender documentation, fire safety and health and safety and all areas of that which you will be responsible for if you're deployed in an infrastructure maintenance company." For those coming from an electronic or and electrical or mechanical engineering background there was quite a lot of development in terms of their knowledge of civil engineering works, technical guidance documents, building regulations, things like that. Generally, within a pool a young officer's course or on the Masters course you will have six to eight students all from various different backgrounds and everybody brings their own both development from their college course but also their own personal experiences to the table and it can be a really well-rounded group that are working together to achieve the qualification at the end of the Images from the ESSC robot and other surveillance cameras fed back to a laptop in the ops room of an ESSC display in Casement Aerodrome Baldonnell back in 2019 Masters" Speaking about the range of tasks an engineer could be involved in, Capt Coughlan recalled his own first deployment oversea in 2014 to the Golan Heights. "My original tasking was that I was going out as a mine clearance officer, an engineer specialist search and clearance officer. Two weeks before we deployed, we were tasked with a completely separate mission which was to go to camp construction. So, we'd spent two months planning and preparing to go out as a mine clearance team, as an engineer specialist search and clearance team and then suddenly two weeks beforehand we were told no you're now going to go and you're going to construct kitchens, you're going to construct accommodation units, you're going to be responsible for range reconstruction. "Because we had the experience both myself as an engineer officer and my tradesmen that I had with me, we had all these skill sets and with a lot of experience prior to deploy we were able to very quickly change our focus based on what we covered previously and our own personal experiences up to that point." Lt Donal Clare told how he joined the Army in 2017 having studied Mechanical Engineering in DIT. He finished there in 2016. He is now coming to the end of the Army Engineer Graduate Programme and is preparing for his first overseas deployment to Syria. "I'm currently at the end of the graduate programme, it's four to five years in total. That means I've developed skills at a basic level in the Cadetship. I've honed those skills specifically in an engineer sense, in young officers programme and I'll now go overseas to apply all those skills that I've learned. It's a challenge I'm looking forward to. I'm going to the UN mission in Syria." He said he had been asked why, having done engineering, he joined the Army. "People don't put those two things together. But I always say to them it's something I have always been drawn to a career in the Defence Forces specifically as an engineer. The reason I chose this career is, it's the unique environment that you're involved in day-to-day, you know it's a unique problem-solving aspect that you have to apply in demanding situations." Talking about the course, he said there were the personal development aspects as well adding: "It was difficult and challenging, what the Army does is it builds you to a particular level that allows you to lead other people. Personally speaking, I reached new levels of fitness, the kind of depths I never thought I could reach." To listen to this podcast follow the link below:- https://www.military.ie/en/members-area/social-media- links/df-podcast/season-3/s3ep1-the-army-engineer- graduate-programme.html DEFENCE FORCES PODCAST

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