Regina Doherty (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

To be honest, I do not know how we can share five minutes between three of us. I will talk today about safer, stronger communities. To my mind, the only way to achieve this is to have more gardaí. I stand today on behalf of gardaí and to say on the record that the HR system and recruitment process of An Garda Síochána is absolutely and utterly broken. Those are not my words but those of superintendents throughout the country. Since 2019, we have had a steady decline in the number of gardaí going through Templemore. We fool ourselves and say this is because of Covid. The spin I saw in the newspapers this weekend was that the country is too overweight and we cannot get fit people. It is a load of nonsense. We have a broken recruitment system. It has nothing to do with the investment the State is making in An Garda Síochána. Last year, the Minister announced money for 800 new recruits. The Minister of State who is here today and the senior Minister announced that there would be 1,000 new recruits next year, yet only 74 people will graduate from Templemore next year. There is something intrinsically wrong there. We do gardaí a disservice if we do not recognise that morale is at the lowest it has ever been. We have far more people retiring, including people who have not reached retirement age, and the numbers being recruited do not come close to replacing them. We have to recognise and put on the record that we need a root-and-branch review of the HR system. In actual fact, what we need is to instruct the Commissioner to take a brand new approach to the recruitment of gardaí. Otherwise, we will be sitting here in another couple of years, missing targets and wondering why we have the criminality we have on the streets and not enough gardaí to address it.