The movie ‘Siege of Jadotville’ shows that only a few modern assault rifles (FN FALS) were allocated. Then they had a Bren gun, a Vickers gun, and many bolt action WWII rifles.
Was this accurate? If so, why were they armed so poorly? Even Ireland was using better arms by this point. It’s not like the UN was pretending that they didn’t see any combat and wouldn’t, because they did provide modern rifles to their troops. So why would these forces have such antiquated technology?
I would mention the way that Peacekeepers works is that the United Nations does not train and equip peacekeepers, its not a UN army. Contributing nations send units from their own military to operate as peacekeepers with the vast majority of the equipment used by the troops at Jadotville being Irish Army equipment.
Now I'm going to base the majority of my answer of the official unit history of the 35th battalion of which the one company was at Jadotville which can be found here
It was only that year that the Irish army had adopted the FAL and not all units had been armed with them fully by this point. But the provisional equipment table does portray the FAL as being the main rifle. It is mentioned that the battalion was only relatively recently equipped with the weapon though so i think it would have been using the lee-Enfield until very recently before shipping out. So i believe that this is an error on the part of the film.
The other weapons are accurate though.
The bren for example was 23 years old at this point, while a lot of countries had moved away from the light machinegun as a concept towards GPMG in terms of actual age plenty of armies use machinegun designs with a basis that are 50 odd years old today and i would argue that the Bren was one of the best example of that breed of full rifle calibre magazine fed light machine guns. And the author of the section on the Jadotville siege down on page 95 in the section 13 does at one point praise the value of the bren gun during the engagement for longer range fire, according to the author up to 1000 yards which is some impressive shooting.
The Vickers is even older of course but given that its main shortcoming is its weight when used in the role of defending a fixed position is a lot less relevant while its strengths of reliability and be able to have an extreme capacity for sustained fire with a pretty respectable effective range all things considered when you've got it on a tripod.
I'm not sure the film technically portrays the right kind of mortar just looking at a few clips real quick but it was a pair of 60mm mortars they were equipped with and i'm pretty sure this was the American M2 60mm mortar. While the author praises the effectiveness of the mortar teams they probably would have benefited from having something a bit heavier like an 81mm or there abouts. The submachine gun show is accurate as the Carl Gustaf m/45 "swedish K". A pretty good SMG for a ww2 SMG, pretty reliable and everything, good capacity. There were still plenty of other countries at this point using SMGs for NCOs although in the specific situation the Jadotville troops might be benefited from just having FALs.
One weapon i don't remember the film showing is they had a few anti-tank weapons. the documents refences the 84mm anti-tank weapon which i'm fairly confident is the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle with the 84mm being used so as to avoid confusion with the gustaf SMG.
IN general the equipment they used wasn't the most modern, the Irish army wasn't and isn't the best equipped about but in a lot of cases this wasn't as bad as you might think.
Adding to what u/the_direful_spring has said about the FAL, according to Private John Gorman who fight in the siege, the company went to the Congo with Lee Enfield but were issued with the FAL when they arrived.