Former soldier Karina Molloy: ‘I distinctly felt his fingers grab my crotch, clawing at the most intimate part of my body’
At five foot nine inches, Karina Molloy is a commanding presence in the Dublin hotel where we meet. She maintains a decades-long love of fitness, noting that if she weren’t here in Dublin, she would be jumping off the pier at Mountcharles in her native Donegal this morning for a swim. “Even in this?” I ask, shuddering. “It’s -2C outside.” She shrugs as if to say, “Well, of course.”
efore we start our interview, 61-year-old Molloy pulls out a photo from her earlier years in the Army. She disliked the photo of her wearing her soldier’s uniform at the time, but now sees an admirably steely young woman in the photo. “And the 24-inch waist,” Molloy adds, laughing.
The PR from her publisher, Hachette, hands Molloy a copy of her book and, for the first time, she sees A Woman In Defence as a finished product. It’s a big moment, and Molloy softens visibly with emotion.
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Karina Molloy on her first trip to Lebanon in the summer of 1985 with Irish Battalion 57
When Molloy retired from the Irish Defence Forces after a 31-year career in February 2012, she returned home to Donegal to look after her mother, who had, by then, been diagnosed with secondary cancer.
“She said, ‘What are you going to do? You may get upstairs and start writing that book,’” Molloy says. “I’d always wanted to write a book (about her experiences in the Army), but there was a clause (in her contract) that you couldn’t write it within two years of retirement. My mum was all, ‘Don’t be sitting here looking after me, just get typing.’ She was a very forceful woman.”
Molloy wanted to write a book charting not just her own career of firsts but a crunch time within Irish Defence Forces history which started in 1981, when Irish women were finally allowed to enlist in the Army.
We were left walking around like unicorns in the barracks for 10 years. You’re talking about 38 women among 13,000 men
“I think the girls who joined are of historical significance that should be there in writing and in history,” Molloy notes. “It should be there forevermore as to what happened to us within the first 10 years, before the next girls came in. People assumed that because the Army took in female cadets every year, that there must be female recruits coming into the Army every year. But no, we were left walking around like unicorns in the barracks for 10 years. You’re talking about 38 women among 13,000 men, so yes, we were unicorns.”
Molloy’s career in the Irish Defences Forces was packed full of firsts. She was the first woman to get promoted to Senior Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) rank. She was the first to attempt the Army Ranger Wing selection course — the Irish equivalent of the UK’s SAS course. She has also, to date, had the most overseas service as a female senior NCO.
But most women who break through glass ceilings will readily attest to the cost of the break. In this instance, the cost was significant; a cost that the public are only beginning to understand in the wake of Katie Hannon’s seismic RTÉ radio documentary Women of Honour.
Molloy opened up to Hannon about her experiences in the Army, and also laid bare the rampant sexism, toxic masculinity, harassment, sexual assault and bullying that she, and other women, endured in the course of their professional soldiering careers. Her experiences are detailed more fully in the book, and are shocking to read.
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Karina Molloy. Picture: Gerry Mooney
She recalls one such moment clearly: after a gruelling couple of days of being out on exercises at Coolmoney Camp, Molloy was relieved to be told by her platoon sergeant to get a shower, a change of clothes and a rest. Exhausted, she stripped down to her T-shirt and underwear in the warm room and fell into a deep sleep. “I was told not to lock the door because there was a safety check to be done, as I was drying my clothes with a fire,” she explains.
“When I woke up, there were three men standing over me in the bed. I froze for a minute and thought, ‘What is to stop these three men closing the door, locking it, and having the three of them rape me? And how can I prove [anything] with three men against me?’ It was a scary few seconds but then they just said, ‘Oh Molloy, don’t get your knickers in a twist, we’re leaving.’ But how long were they even there?”
During her NCO training in 1984, Molloy was swimming in a pool in Rathmines among her fellow trainees when she felt an arm brush between her legs. “The first time we passed each other in the pool lane, I passed it off as an accidental collision,” Molloy writes in her book. “However, the second time we passed each other, there was no mistaking it. I distinctly felt his fingers grab my crotch, clawing at the most intimate part of my body.”
Shaken, she told her boyfriend at the time about the incident. “I wasn’t going to report it but he persuaded me and said, ‘You’d better report it because, if you don’t report it, the next step will be an attempted rape,’” she recalls. “That really frightened me. I naively put in my application to see the company commander or the course commander and expected a private interview between him and me to discuss it.”
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Karina Molloy during the ground phase of the NCO course at the Glen of Imaal, Wicklow, in 1984
Instead, she entered a room of four men, including two sergeants. They told her that her boyfriend had assaulted the man in question and if she were to go ahead with her report, the man would then go ahead with his own.
“I didn’t realise that [my boyfriend] hadn’t actually touched him. I didn’t get a chance to check out their story,” Molloy recalls. “I very much knew I was still only a private, and I thought, ‘I have to pass this course. I’m just going to have to suck it up.’ I don’t know where I got the courage to stand there and demand that I never need to go swimming again. Their attitude was, ‘I don’t give a f**k whether you go swimming or not. Just get out.’”
In 1990, she was on an overseas mission with the man she calls Officer X in the book, who had seemed to enjoy verbally demeaning her since they first crossed paths. Calling him out on it, Molloy was accused of not being able to take a joke, and that this was all merely harmless “banter”. If she’d heard that word once in her career, she’d heard it 1,000 times.
One night on this overseas mission, Molloy woke at midnight to find someone banging and kicking on the door of her sleeping quarters, which were in the international camp, as was the norm on every overseas mission she had been on. Her colleague, drunk and aggressive, was doing the kicking.
“Okay Molloy, I’m having you now,” he said, before pushing her onto the bed and attempting to open her dressing gown. She managed to get free and ran to the Irish camp, where she reported the incident to a senior officer. She was told to “forget about it”.
Molloy approached a fellow soldier about backing her up over the incident. “He said no,” she recalls, “He said, ‘I want nothing to do with it. You’re on your own Karina, I value my career.’”
“None of the men that have been found guilty of sexual assault in the Defence Forces have been put on the sex offenders register,” Molloy adds. “You start doing that, and there finally will be accountability.
“The perpetrator gets a little slap on the wrist, or a little fine, and is told, ‘You’ll be alright. We’ll get you overseas.’”
After the airing of Hannon’s documentary in September 2021, many politicians — among them Alan Shatter, who was defence minister between 2011 and 2014 — called for an investigation into the allegations of sexual abuse and harassment in the Irish Defence Forces.
When you start cycling into work and thetears are streaming down your face, you know it’s time to leave
“Since the documentary, [the Department of Defence] has come up with all these elaborate marvellous videos — ‘It Stops Now’ and ‘Let’s Show The Red Card’,” says Molloy. “They are saying [to soldiers], ‘If you see this happening and you don’t interfere, then you accept it’s happening’ and all of this.” So far, Molloy notes, the Irish Defence Forces has yet to see any real cultural shift beyond the lip service.
“You keep hearing ‘it’s the culture’, but it’s not the culture. Misogynistic culture can be changed, through education,” she says.
“I did suggest that instructors be swapped within two years, before they get too comfortable,” Molloy adds. “Like, ‘I got away with this in the last recruit training, let’s see how far I can push this batch and see what I get away with.’ Because that has happened.”
I ask Molloy where this culture of misogyny came from within the Army. Much of it had to do with the infrastructure when it came to women recruits back in 1981, which put the female entrants immediately on the back foot.
“We came in as non-combatants and didn’t do duties for 10 years, and the men would see us going home every weekend while they did duties, and they called us out on it. But it was not our doing,” says Molloy. “The Government decided to make us non-combatant because Irish society couldn’t cope with seeing a female walking around with weapons.
“On our passing out, we did a silly foot drill, as opposed to an arms drill display. As I perceived it, we were on the national news that day and I suppose the Government decided, ‘Let’s not have the little ladies use arms. Let’s not expose the public to the fact that they are trained killers like the men,’ which we were. Because we were non-combatants, there was this reasoning, ‘You’re taking up the place of a man that can do the job. You stole a man’s place. We’re going to make this three times as difficult for you to pass this course.’”
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The passing out parade of the first female recruit platoon at McDonagh Square in the Curragh Camp in October 1981
“It’s my opinion, and my opinion only, that colonels in the Irish Army realised that these ladies will become sergeant majors very quickly, or they’ll go up the ranks too quickly. That there will be a female Major General within 10 years, and that just couldn’t happen.
“I think a lot of it was fear and jealousy,” she says later. “It was envisaged that women would do more desk-based jobs so that the men could be taken out of that environment and put into the more masculine role of soldier. They’d seen us as a threat. The old sweats, as we called them, would have embedded themselves in cushy jobs, and here were these women coming now, and they probably thought, ‘I’m going to get f**ked out onto the square to do some real soldiering now.’ Women had to work twice as hard to get to the same level, and a lot of the women were actually better than some of the men, which did not go down well.”
Some of the female soldiers who recounted their experiences alongside Molloy on Women of Honour noted that they suffered from eating disorders, depression and suicide ideation. Many had left the Defence Forces as a result.
What made Molloy stay the course for as long as she did? Even the fellow male soldiers that she considered as friends questioned why she didn’t quit. More unkind ones took bets on how long she would last on various tours, or training courses. “They want me to quit, so I won’t,” she told one of her colleagues. “I’m just a stubborn bitch.”
Today, of her decision to stay for more than three decades, she says: “I figured we’d have to stay in to make it better. My attitude is, if you want to change the room, you have to stay in it to change the room.”
In 1992, women in the Irish Defence Forces became fully combatant. “I thought, ‘Now we’re going to get respect. Now we’re finally going to be doing duties, we’ll be finally accepted.’ It was like, ‘Can we stop with the misogyny and have respect for us? No.’”
Despite the many strides that Molloy made in her career, she felt unable to fully smash the Army’s glass ceiling. And then, in her 29th year, came “the straw that broke the camel’s back”.
“I did an overseas battalion as a CQ (Company Quartermaster). It’s the toughest job and I was the first ever female to do it. They had a gambling pool going on to see how long I would last. I was just devastated. I had to work with these men every day and I thought they had my back, but all they were doing was sniggering and laughing at me behind my back.”
Undeterred, Molloy persevered. Originally, she wanted to become the Army’s first female Sergeant Major. In the end, she decided that she would retire at the level of BQ (Battalion Quartermaster), just above the CQ rank where she was at.
“When I was in Chad, I applied for BQ vacancies and got this lame excuse about how it was a Muslim country, and it wasn’t that I wouldn’t be able to cope, but the Muslim society, the men out there, like men working for the airport authorities, would not accept having to discuss things with a female. I complained about that and was told someone higher up had made the decisions. I also noticed on the personal file that they had written that I’d only served twice as a CQ overseas, when in fact I was on my sixth trip.”
One afternoon, Molloy received an anonymous, handwritten letter. “It said, ‘Carry on applying for those vacancies, because you’re giving us a great laugh here Molloy. You’re never going to get one.’ At that stage, I was cycling into work and crying, and it’s when you start cycling into work and the tears are streaming down your face, you know it’s time to leave.”
Returning to civilian life after a 31-year career initially felt like a relief, but soon Molloy began to feel rudderless. “For 30 years, I didn’t even have to worry about what to wear,” she says. “No, it was a hard adjustment, and I had this idea that everything would fall into place. I had a dream — I since discovered it was my father’s dream that he’d somehow embedded in me — that he was going to retire to the South of France. So I figured that I would go and buy a villa in the South of France. But then life takes over.”
Coming from a family with military blood that went back generations, both in the British and Irish armies, Molloy grew up as a real tomboy, entranced by war movies and westerns on the TV at home in Ardara, Donegal. Initially, she had PE teaching in her crosshairs, but was soon enamoured of the idea of becoming a physical training instructor in the Army. “My mum always wanted a nurse in the family, but I never wanted to have a normal or traditional job. When I discovered I could combine being a physical training instructor in the Army with the military and this exciting life, it was all about the travel.
“It’s only when you realise when you’re older what kind of pressure your parents put on you,” Molloy says. “They put their disappointments on top of their children, and Dad was, I will admit, a failed officer. He was gutted that he couldn’t take his commission. He saw that my brother wasn’t ambitious in that way and figured, ‘Well, if I can’t become an officer, you can bet my daughter will.’ There was that stress and pressure from day one. But in the end, I wanted to become the first female Sergeant Major, not to be my Daddy’s pride and joy and to get pips (the stars worn on a military uniform) on my shoulder.”
I ask her what she might tell an 18-year-old woman, full of ambitions to travel, to forge a career and serve in the Army and be the best soldier she can be, about joining up. Chiefly, her advice would be to wait until real, measurable progress has been made in terms of gender equality.
“It’s interesting. The Chief of Staff (Lieutenant General Seán Clancy) was on Ryan Tubridy’s radio show last year — both of them have daughters and they both admitted that they wouldn’t let their daughters go into the Army,” says Molloy. “I don’t think that parents are allowing their daughters to join anyway, as last year, only 15 [women] joined. Parents are very reluctant to allow them to go in. That said, I think the young people are more switched on to the MeToo movement, and they’re very, very switched on about their rights. They won’t take the kind of abuse that we took.”
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Karina Molloy’s book ‘A Woman In Defence: A Soldier’s Story of The Enemy Within The Irish Army’, co-written by Kathryn Rogers, is published now via Hachette Books
https://www.independent.ie/life/former-soldier-karina-molloy-i-distinctly-felt-his-fingers-grab-my-crotch-clawing-at-the-most-intimate-part-of-my-body-42314323.html Former soldier Karina Molloy: ‘I distinctly felt his fingers grab my crotch, clawing at the most intimate part of my body’