Keeping the Peace

Five hundred soldiers of the Irish Defence Forces are stationed in Liberia, part of a 15,000-strong United Nations Peacekeeping mission, the largest UN force in the world. What does it mean to these young men and women to be peacekeepers? What does it mean to be soldiers trained in both how to fight and how not to? Rarely have peacekeeping soldiers talked so candidly and revealingly about the day to day realities of their job, trying to hold together a fragile peace in the aftermath of fourteen years of civil war.