Pa Daly (Kerry, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

In addition, many gardaí I know are buying back their pension and leaving early. This means that, in addition to the resignations, retirements are accelerated because people are leaving early. That seems to be the case. I am not necessarily referring to the Minister herself but a succession of Ministers came before the Dáil in the early to middle part of this year to tell us that 289 had entered Templemore up to the end of June. If you do the maths on that, you see there was no way the figure of 1,000 was going to be reached and yet Ministers, including an Taoiseach, came into the Dáil and said that 1,000 was the target, although it might be difficult to meet. Would it not have been more realistic for the Government to hold its hands up in the middle of the summer and say that it was not going to meet the target rather than sticking to the line that it hoped to meet the figure of 1,000 extra gardaí? It was simply not going to happen that 1,000 gardaí would go through Templemore this year.