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THE GARDA TRAINING Allowance is set to be increased in a bid to boost Garda recruitment figures.
The current Garda Training Allowance, paid to recruits for the 33 weeks leading to them being sworn in as Garda members, is currently €305 per week and will be increased to €354 per week.
It follows a significant increase of the payment in January of this year, when the allowance was raised from €184 per week to €305 per week.
Justice Minister Helen McEntee made the announcement this afternoon from the Fine Gael think-in at the Tullamore Court Hotel in Co Offaly.
She said the increase will come into effect from 1 October and that it is in line with increases provided for in the Public Service Agreement 2024 – 2026.
McEntee said that Budget 2024 “provided the highest ever allocation to An Garda Síochána – over €2.35 billion, a 25% increase since 2020”.
She said the funding allows for the “continued recruitment of Garda members and staff, as well as investment in vehicles, equipment, and facilities for the organisation”.
McEntee further remarked that the increase in the Garda training allowance announced today builds on the previous increase from €184 to €305 per week and “represents an almost doubling of the allowance in the last 12 months”.
She said this is “one of a number of actions I am taking to support garda recruitment and retention”.
Other actions already undertaken include increasing the age of entry into An Garda Síochána from 35 to 50, increasing the retirement age from 60 to 62, and commencing a new Garda reserve competition.
The Garda Reserve is a volunteer service drawn from local communities and reserves work alongside full-time gardaí and assist in a variety of policing tasks.
McEntee added: “I have consistently said that no action is off the table when it comes to supporting Garda recruitment.
“I have established a Garda Recruitment Training Capacity Group to make recommendations on additional actions to increase recruitment, and that will report to me shortly.”
In March, Garda Commissioner Drew Harris said he hoped officer numbers would reach 15,000 in the short term.
However, as of the end of July, the Garda member strength stood at 14,064.
Figures provided by the Policing Authority also showed in the first seven months of this year, there were 88 resignations among Garda members and 154 retirements.
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What’s needed is reform of our lenient, mollycoddling justice system. We need more prisons. The rotating door system that is our justice system must completely wreck Gardai morale. Imagine arresting the same scrote for the 5th time in a month, just for him to be out the next week because Martin Nolan slapped him with a suspended sentence. Ffs, there’s lads walking around with hundreds of convictions. A gardas job arresting somebody, dealing with the mountains of paperwork, court appearences, etc, is absolutely ruined when the lenient sentences are handed down time and time again. For example, the justice minister recently increased the maximum sentence for assaulting a Garda. This is a useless measure, as very rarely is a maximum sentence applied. We need mandatory MINIMUM strict sentences
@Sean Stevenson: 100%
@Sean Stevenson: 100% correct.
You can and should, to some extend, pay them more, but if you (the guard) does see that the work is useless again and again, why bother?
Bad upbringing, “culture”, or supposed mental issues as an excuse for a suspended sentence for the 50th or +100th time.
Even for driving offence – was it not a young lady, doing almost 200km\h who got away only with a fine, because she “didn’t notice the speed in her mothers car”, she was driving? I think this one was Nolan as well.
@Sean Stevenson: im sick of this goverment with all there kite flying sound bites all talk more take its all just waffle waffle and more waffle,,
Arguably this is throwing money at a problem in the hope it will fix everything. It won’t do much for the numbers leaving the service and what was the cause of them leaving. What is the turnaround for those taking the training and then leaving after less than 2 years I wonder?
@Sean Stevenson: Glad you mentioned Judge Martin Nolan…. the sex offenders escape card. Needs to be investigated himself, total nonce sympathiser. Even a petition online to get rid of him….
@Sean Stevenson: they haven’t built a new prison since Wheatfield which opened in 1989. There’s nowhere to put offenders.
@John Fahy: they ate building on the new prison site… to accommodate immigrants. Country is in bits.
@Sean Stevenson: the scrote often leaves court sooner as the Garda as the Paperwork is done for him. The Garda needs to do his own
End suspended sentences and you’ll see the vast majority of people including the guards get happy.
Oh wait – judges are ex solicitors – so the legal gravy train continues for Judges and their pals
They badly need a new prison in this country, I was reading articles in local paper about lads getting prison for couple of months and then couple of days later seeing same lads in bookies telling me prison so overcrowded they just get released after a couple of days. How demoralising must that be to the garda and where is the rehabilitation? Whats to stop them doing the same stuff all over again?
@Iron Man: Or more than one.
@Eamon: Thornton hall was purchased specifically for a new prison and a new central mental hospital. The central mental hospital was built in portrayed and no new prison built and the millions spent buying the site and putting utilities in were wasted unless you count the happy chance that the site was vacant to use for refugee accommodation.
Meanwhile nurses pay for their own training, get a higher degree, then get paid less, so they leave our country for places where they can afford the rent. But who cares….
@Acumen: there’s plenty of articles on nurses pay and how disgraceful it is but this article is about the disgraceful pay garda trainees receive, why try pitt one against the other, both serve the country but in different ways and both should be paid accordingly. Oh and there’s plenty of professions that people pay for their education to get a degree in, not just nurses.
@Acumen: they get paid during practical training but their degrees allow them to work globally in both public and private sector. If nursing couldn’t fill spots, they would need to change the system as gardai are now doing.
Disgraceful decision by judge Alec Gabbett with the two Chinese illegals that broke the law and entered the country.
@You’re Not Serious: That useless o’donnell “judge” is, thankfully, gone from Limk but one of his best students, gabbett in Ennis will keep the pointless, expensive, waste going and further drive potential recruits from joining our police force. Additionally it probably follows that some current police members are contemplating leaving due to the empty stupidity of it all.
@You’re Not Serious: not to mind all those arriving at airports and dumping their passports before they arrive at immigration. They should be automatically returned to sender, dumped out of the country, without access to the courts
Can we not just go to the Philippines or India or Africa and hire big strapping lads from there, that’s what we do for nurses. It’s a pity we can’t get solicitors, politicians, accountants etc from these countries because then we could save a fortune.
@Eddie Garvey: already trained nurses. Medicine is global, law is not
I think a lot of the reason for ridiculously lenient sentencing is because of near conflict of interest among the District Court judges. All of them are former solicitors. Usually small town political appointees. It suits them to release the same scrotes time and time again. They keep their ex colleagues happy with the free legal aid fountain pouring our money into their pockets.
So that’s €7.62 per hour for a 40 hour week
@Dominick Lodola: plus accommodation and food. Meanwhile nurses pay for their training . 16k for a four year degree. Plus food and accommodation.
A FG think in. Not many brain cells there
Who’d be a guard nowadays. They’d zero respect from the many many toerags that walk our streets. Thousands of 13-17 year olds roaming the streets with zero respect for anyone or anything.
Garda numbers will continue to drop. Annual Retirements and alarmingly early resignations eating into the figures recruitment cannot stop. It’s a truly awful job today. People want easy safe degree office work Monday to Friday. Not hell on earth physical manual work involving nights weekends holidays, being attacked and assaulted, spat at.
Has anyone watched the RTÈ production ‘On the Beat’?? I’ve seriously never had such tummy laughs after switching over from Virgin Media’s ‘The Guards- Into the K’… I genuinely thought it was a parody… it was actually like watching an episode of Father Ted.
During that initial lockdown, so many graduated early from Templemore it’s farcical.
My Brother’s friend who is a young photography student was fined €600 for being outside his 5km (Sandyford to the Dublin Mountains ALONE)… 2 members of AGS confronted him. Why were they driving around there together in the middle of nowhere?? Hmmm… therefore I literally have no respect for our Force.
@Donna Fallon: there was no 600 euro fine. It was 500 and they were patrolling, kinda part of the job
Get the Bully’s out of the Garda and more young people will join and stay. The GRA are a joke and so is McEntee. The government don’t care tbh and only trying to save money. If the public knew the real numbers and issues in Garda stations there would be uproar. But, you can assure the criminals know it. The numbers are so bad at there there must be filtering emergency calls to stations as the numbers are not there. AGS is now unfixable and Harris, his management the GRA, McEntee & FG can take 100% of the blame.
It’s the cry of the weary, more resources!
Shameful increase.
Any word on how the recruitment of people between 35 & 50 went,- or is going??. We were told that it would make a significant difference,– I doubt if anyone applied at all. In any case She has never mentioned it recently,– so it must be a flop. Apparently, the resignation figures are still very high , it’s the pension rights that need to be amended.
@Andrew Clavin: Of course, it was madness when it was introduced, but McEntee bluffed her way and made it look like a lifesaver . They also bluffed about a load of yellow packs ( reserves) , that was a dead duck too. McEntee is a complete dunce , and is way out of her debt , Drew Harris is a big problem as well, and bringing down Chiefs from the RUC is totally wrong
Big shit clean up in tullamore
Just wait until the mass Garda exit in April (now already known about); then all the wheels will fall off.
ok
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