Chad peace mission - Blessed are the enforcers

THE soldiers deployed today, as part of the UN-mandated operation EU for in Chad, will not be the first Irishmen to carry arms in that vast, war-torn region. Though this time they serve the ideal of peace rather than an empire-building Queen.

In January 1885 Gen Sir Garnet Wolseley led a relief expedition to try to rescue the besieged Gordon at Khartoum, and, as is often the case with British forces, there was more than one Irishman wearing the Queen’s colours.

Today’s mission faces a task every bit as daunting and as exposed as Wolseley’s — they must impose peace on the descendants of those who, a little more than 120 years ago, defied the greatest force then in the world.