Marie Gleeson

Do you know the way when you talk about purpose, like in companies and stuff, they're like a purpose mission statement values, like that's all military terminology.

Like you're talking about that drug mission.

Like when you're involved in a mission where your purpose is to take narcotics, illegal narcotics off the streets of Ireland.

And when you're on the high seas, 175 miles southwest of Kerry, the middle of the night, the dark, the intensity, really tough weather conditions.

And you're all prepping to go out into that world like that's purpose.

Everybody's aligned.

Everyone knows what the mission is.

And like when the two boats go away from the ship with the boarding team, that's a third of the crew gone.

So that means two thirds have got to step up and they've got to do 100 percent and they've got to man all the weapons and they've got to be operating at the top.

So in that instance, there's no man, there's no woman.

You know, you're looking at the team and can the team do it?

You know, and you've cooks firing weapons and you've engineers trying to make sandwiches.

Won't talk about that, but they did feed us eventually.

But like, you know, the moments in that mission when, you know, the boats were deployed and we were waiting for the signal from them, like you're in the dark, you're gone silent, you know, everything is shut down and you're just waiting on one code word and everybody is waiting.

That intensity is hard to replicate in a normal nine to five job.

So, yeah, you'd absolutely miss that.

No, yeah, no.

I'd say I would have been fascinated by the Navy back then because I didn't know anything about the Navy.

So I come from a really small dairy farm in Tipperary.

I grew up on the farm, eldest of six, out on the farm with my dad.