At least once during their deployment on the Golan Heights, the men and women of the 48th Infantry Group will trust their lives to Lieut Jane O’Neill (32) from Knocklyon in south Co Dublin.
She is in charge of mine clearance and the Golan’s “area of separation” (AOS), the buffer zone between Israeli-occupied Syria and Syria proper in which the United Nations is mandated to operate.
Much of the area has been overrun by insurgents in the Syrian civil war and it is now, as Lieut O’Neill observes, a mine-rich environment.
There are essentially two dangers: purpose-made anti- personnel mines, usually buried just below the surface and often detonated when pressure is applied by foot or a vehicle, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), favoured by insurgent forces and typically detonated by a command wire or by remote control.
Irish expertise
The Defence Forces developed a high level of expertise in dealing with IEDs because of the activities of the IRA, dissident republicans and other gangland criminal elements in Ireland, as well as through their overseas experiences.
O’Neill went to Our Lady’s in Templeogue and then to Trinity College Dublin, where she graduated as an engineer.
She had a master’s in civil engineering and worked on the new Criminal Courts of Justice building in Dublin while with construction firm PJ Hegarty. She joined the Defence Forces in 2009, aged 26, the first in her family to pursue a military career.
“You go in in the morning and you think, ‘Okay, I have to do this job, get this tender out by today and check that drawing’ – and then you find you get an emergency call-out for a gorse fire or for flooding, and suddenly you find yourself in a helicopter heading off to the west of Ireland. Your day is not predictable,” she says.
Suspect terrain
“That’s nice. It’s a different job. Obviously, when you come in soaked to the bone like I was about an hour ago and had to change everything – like ‘What am I doing this for’? but, generally, it’s grand.”
On the Golan, O’Neill is engineer officer in charge of a 10-strong team of de-miners, a skill she learned during 18 months specialist training.
Typical of the sort of banter common among soldiers, other troops sometimes refer to engineers as “whinge-ineers”, but in truth, they have a lot of trust in what they do.
To do their job, the de-miners have specialist equipment and some very specific procedures.
Alighting from a vehicle in suspect terrain, for example, a de-miner will initially check the ground immediately surrounding the vehicle and mark a defined space within which it is safe to work.
Radiating out and checking for mines and IEDs is done using two handheld devices, a VMH5 vallon detector and a WD100. Both are broom handle-like implements, the VMH5 having a circular base, the WD100 a sort of dumbbell-shaped base.
Wearing headphones connected to the devices, de-miners walk slowly and carefully over suspect terrain, holding the device in front of them and sweeping it from side to side across the surface of the ground.
The vallon will detect objects below the surface, relaying sound to the de-miner’s headphones, the tone varying according to the material detected. The WD100 is designed specifically to detect wires leading, perhaps, to an IED.
A third de-miner follows, using spray paint to mark the safe path that colleagues in front have identified or marking suspect ground with bright orange sticks.
If a suspicious object is detected, the ground will be probed by inserting a long, poker-like needle at a 75-degree angle, feeling the edges of the object, confirming, or not, that it is a mine.
Refugees
This isn’t O’Neill’s first overseas mission: an earlier one saw her seconded this time last year to the World Food Programme of the United Nations, under the auspices of Irish Aid’s Rapid Reaction Corps.
She spent three months in Gaziantep in southern Turkey, about 70km from the Syrian border, project-managing the conversion and refurbishment of a former textile factory into a single location for most of the local UN agencies dealing with the influx of Syrian refugees.
“I handed over a finished building and the week I left, all the UN agencies moved in,” she says.
“They were delighted with the building because after working out of a hotel conference room, they had a purpose-built building with canteen facilities and everything.”
