Female navy recruits barricaded door after colleague broke in and ‘interfered’ with underwear

Female navy recruits barricaded their bedroom door at night and padlocked their drawers after an unidentified male colleague broke into their training barracks and ejaculated on their underwear, a tribunal has heard.

A military police investigation never found the perpetrator, which left former Naval Service member Sinead Doyle feeling “anxious”, “paranoid” and worried anyone she worked with could have been the person who did it.

She ultimately left the Defence Forces as a result of the way the investigation was carried out. “I really didn’t know at any point was I talking perhaps to the person that might have been the perpetrator,” she said.

Doyle felt there was a “culture of deterrence” in the navy, whereby “instead of being treated as a victim, I felt I was treated with contempt by the chain of command”.

She told the Defence Forces Tribunal on Thursday she felt female recruits were “labelled as problematic”.

The incident arose in August 2011 when Doyle, then 20 years old, was the sole female navy recruit in her class at Haulbowline Naval Base.

She slept in a separate room from the male cadets with another woman in a different recruit class.

The pair returned from an off-base training exercise to discover that someone had entered their locked bedroom, had been in their beds and had “interfered with” their underwear drawers.

Doyle and the other woman found that several pairs of underwear “had a white stain on them that looked like semen”.

She was later told that a man who was never identified entered their room three times while they were off base, and that a separate incident had targeted her roommate’s clothes the previous month.

They did not initially report the incident as they were concerned they would lose a period of leave or been seen to get “special treatment” for being women in a “male dominated” space.

The women threw out and washed all but one piece of the affected underwear. It was their male colleagues who told an instructor on their behalf and a military police investigation began.

The two women were afraid that the same man could enter their room while they were asleep and began putting chests of drawers against the door as “extra security”.

When they left their room, they put a chain and padlock on their drawers and made sure to check the room was empty when they returned.

Doyle was in “quite a vulnerable position” and the incident “caused a lot of anxiety”.

She had pointed to one of her instructors at the training college who she felt “uncomfortable around”.

Their room was locked, with entrance only by key card, but a master key card available to staff gave access to all bedrooms in the complex.

The investigation into the incident discovered that the instructor had access to the master key card during the period in which the break-in took place.

John Leahy, the acting chief petty officer of the Naval Service at the time, ran the investigation into the incident. He took DNA samples from the recruits and training staff who were present at the time of the incident.

Leahy told the tribunal the instructor had accessed the women’s accommodation during the period to check the cause of a warning light on a control panel, and again on another occasion.

It was only after Leahy’s 14-month investigation into the incident that he discovered a member of the training staff had come to Garda attention over a “civilian criminal offence”.

He was only told of the existence of a sign-out book for the use of the master key card, and a digital record showing the time whenever the door was opened by each key, when giving evidence to the tribunal some 15 years after the fact.

Forensic analysis would later confirm the substance as semen but did not connect it to anyone on the base.

Doyle was not formally told this, instead finding out when she bumped into an investigator some time later. After initial meetings and interviews, months passed with no updates.

Doyle said she made a complaint to the Ombudsman for the Defence Forces. She said she was told there was help available if her goal was to “pursue a career” in the Defence Forces, but that “there really wasn’t much point” if her plan was to leave.

Later, returning to the college after she had graduated, she followed up on the investigation, feeling it was her “duty to ensure that everything was done” to catch the perpetrator.

She had concerns the perpetrator could be “capable” of more serious sexual offences and was worried for the single female in a later cadet class.

When she was posted to patrol ship LÉ Aisling in May 2012, she returned from leave to find male relief crew sleeping in her bunk with her belongings bagged up and accessible to them.

The event was “triggering” and contributed to her “declining mental health”.

She then expressed her “intent to leave” the navy. “I was very much paranoid, I was worried for my safety a lot of the time,” she said.

She was moved to a naval reserve base in Dublin near her family and sought mental health support before being discharged, feeling unsafe in the force and having lost faith in the investigation.

Doyle told the tribunal her experience was that the Defence Forces attempted to protect its reputation instead of addressing the crime.