Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 26 June 2025
Public Accounts Committee
Appropriation Accounts 2023
Vote 20 - An Garda Síochána
2:00 am
Ms Siobhán Toale:
The Deputy is correct that we have not achieved our targets in the past number of years. We had targeted to achieve 200 per intake. We are pleased that in an intake earlier this year we achieved 200, and we want to rise our intakes to 225 and 250. The Deputy asked if it was capacity in the college or something else. Our current constraint is not capacity in the college, but I will respond to that in a minute. Our current constraint has been attracting and getting candidates in. As the Commissioner said, we have made a number of changes to improve the experience of the candidates throughout the process and keep them with us and simplify the process. We are making a further step this year in moving from an annual competition to a further competition. We are pleased to let the Deputy know that we intend to run a further competition in September, so we create a more fluid and always-on pipeline of candidates, and we move from the stop-start.