Kevin's stellar 40-year career in Irish Army
CASTLEBAR native, Commandant Kevin McDonald, retired from the Irish Defence Forces last November after 40 years in uniform and many tours of duty in war-torn zones overseas.
After his retirement he got a short-term contract with the UN as the Chief of Security Information and Operations Centre in the MINUSCA HQ in Bangui, the capital and largest city of the Central African Republic, writes Tom Gillespie.
Since then he got an extension for 12 months and was appointed Regional Security Officer in Sector East, in a place called Bria.
Kevin, son of the late Paraic and Bernie McDonald, originally from Newantrim Street and more recently Greenfields, Castlebar, looks back on a distinguished career.
He told me: “Saturday, November 26, 2016, was a poignant day for me as it marked the day I retired from the Irish Defence Forces on age grounds. It marked the end of 40 years in uniform, seven years with the 5th Cavalry Squadron in Castlebar and 33 years in various units both at home and abroad.
“My fledgling career with the 5th Cavalry Squadron nearly took a nose dive (literally) when a few of us despatch riders were asked to drive over to Westport in the late 1970s to lead the opening of the summer festival.
“No problem to that, you might think, but letting three 16-year-olds off on their own on 400cc motorbikes was probably not fully thought through.
“Naturally we had a race on the way over and then someone had forgotten to tell us that the gardaí would be waiting at the entrance to the town to escort us to the parade. Not expecting any guards, I descended the hill into Westport at around 40 mph standing on the saddle with my arms outstretched like the scene in the Titanic.
“As if that wasn’t a sterling start to my military career, myself and my brother Brendan hold the dubious distinction of being the first and presumably only members of the Defence Forces to get locked up in a communist jail in East Germany.
“We were touring Europe on motorbikes and detoured off the main transit route into a town only to be met by a rather irate policeman none-too-impressed with our navigation skills.”
Kevin continued: “After a good seven years with the 5th Cavalry I decided that the army was the life for me and there being no recruitment in the west, I had to enlist in the Eastern Command – Monaghan, to be precise.
“Before I was even interviewed, I had to agree to serve a minimum of three years in the 29th Battalion. I was overseas in Lebanon within a year and during that trip came the one and only time I ever had to give the order to open fire in combat.
“On return to Ireland I looked for more challenges and ended up spending five years with a fairly tough unit in The Curragh. I left that unit in 1990 to return to Castlebar, but despite engaging in some serious rock climbing (some of it up the walls of the barracks), I still needed a greater challenge so I applied for the 7th Potential Officers’ course.
“That opened up an entirely new career for me and I was commissioned in 1992 and was overseas again in 1993. That deployment was great because I managed to convince/bribe an official with a catering can of Maxwell House coffee to issue a visa for my then girlfriend Clare to come out and visit me - she was one of the first western tourists in Lebanon after the civil war ended.
“Little did she know that she would be back there 10 years later living in Lebanon with a three- and a five-year-old!”
Kevin added: “I deployed to the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO) in 2005 and we initially lived in Tiberias by the Sea of Galilee as I was working on the occupied Golan Heights. Then, in February 2006, I was transferred to Lebanon so we got an apartment in the southern city of Tyre.
“My sister Sandra and her husband Paul had come out for a visit in July. They flew back on Monday, July 10, and I headed up to the patrol base for a seven-day stint on Tuesday, said goodbye to my wife, Clare, and the kids, saying ‘I’ll see you in a week’. The following day the war kicked off between Hizbullah and Israel which lasted a very brutal 34 days.
“Where I was based I could see the bombs landing in Tyre and Clare could look up at the distant ridgeline and see the smoke rising from where I was. Eventually the UN decided to evacuate the families and as Clare was getting the kids into the lifeboat that would bring them out to a chartered ship, I rang her and said ‘I’ll see you when I see you’, which - believe me - is not the way to end a family mission to the Middle East.
“Thankfully they survived, unlike four very good friends of mine who were killed in an Israeli air strike on their patrol base, and we had a further two more colleagues seriously wounded in separate incidents.”
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