IN recent weeks it seems like a number of social infrastructure pillars are experiencing cracks.
While pickets continued at fire stations around the county over a dispute regarding retained firefighters’ pay, a crisis in An Garda Síochána was making big news last week.
The crisis appears to be the result of many issues coming to light at once.
It has been no secret that the Irish police force has been having recruitment and retention issues for some time, but the stark reality of the extent of the problem has now come into sharp focus.
The discussions about the numbers in the force rose once again as a result of the horrific attack on American tourist Stephen Termini, off Talbot Street in Dublin.
It prompted an outpouring of personal stories about anti-social behaviour on the streets of our capital, and most observers included the observation that the decline, in recent years, of a visible on-street police force has exacerbated the problem.
That led to a bigger debate about garda numbers and what has, in effect, become a veritable exodus from the force.
In response to the debate, An Garda Síochána issued startling figures about this exodus.
A total of 150 gardaí retired in just the first five months of this year, while a shocking 59 more resigned.
That is almost 60 regular gardaí leaving before reaching retirement age.
Bear in mind that members must retire by age 60 anyway and, if they joined after 2004, they may retire as early as age 55. So news of gardaí leaving before even getting to those young age targets is indeed disquieting.
Other figures recently released show more unsettling numbers – a fall of almost 4% in garda numbers in that troubled Dublin North Central division since January, and a statistic revealing all but one of the country’s 27 garda divisions has seen a decrease in garda numbers since January.
The government had previously stated a target of 15,000 for the force, with 4,000 civilian support staff by 2021. But that has long since been missed, with less than 14,000 now comprising the force.
There is no doubt that increasing stress levels, combined with higher instances of crime and personal attacks on gardaí themselves, are all adding to the drop-off in numbers.
But less gardaí means stress becomes a vicious cycle – less staff means those left behind carry a greater burden.
And there are other issues at play, too. Policy decisions, in recent years, have seen less gardaí ‘on the beat’, resulting in a perception in some quarters that there are less consequences for bad behaviour.
In the 80s and 90s, the expectation that a garda may be lurking around the next corner, was a great deterrent to those contemplating a crime.
This was especially evident in rural towns, which now seem prone to issues similar to inner city Dublin, with most towns awash with drugs and a prevalence of bad behaviour at weekends post-pub closing times, spilling out onto streets with no garda presence.
Many garda stations in good-sized towns don’t even have 24/7 cover – a call to one will see the phone directed to another town’s answering service.
This lack of interaction with the public has been replicated in the collapse of the sharing of vital information with local media too. Two or three decades ago, a small road traffic incident, or a robbery, could be verified by a quick call by a local journalist to the town’s sergeant or even the garda on duty.
No such lines of communication are available today. A reporter’s query on even the slightest incident in a rural area is met with an instruction to refer matters, by email, to the Garda Press Office in Dublin. This then prompts the press office to make the same query to the garda station in question, and a reply email is then despatched, often an hour or two later, to the relevant media.
In a bid to make a system more user-friendly, we have instead created layers of bureaucracy that are now stymieing good relationships and hampering the efficient flow of basic information.
But the real elephant in the room is the attraction of the job itself. If members are burned out, and not being replaced by adequate numbers of new recruits, then surely the most important issues to address immediately, similar to our retained firefighters, are pay and conditions.
That, at least, would be a good starting point.
