Gardaí miss recrutiment target, parliamentary question to Ward confirms

Sinn Féin spokesperson for community safety and youth justice, Mark Ward TD, has highlighted that the government’s Garda recruitment numbers will be far below their targets for this year.

The Dublin Mid-West TD submitted a parliamentary question which asked the Minister for Justice if the Gardaí were going to meet it’s targets.

In response to Ward, the Minister for Justice confirmed that the number of gardaí for 2025 will be between 600 and 650, which is far below the Department’s stated target of 1,000.

Ward, Sinn Féin’s Dublin spokesperson, said “Garda recruitment has been a consistent failure by successive governments; everyone is in agreement that we need more Gardaí on our streets and in our communities.”

He noted that the government will now likely fail to meet it’s target of recruiting 5,000 gardaí over the next five years.

“I asked the Minister for Justice at the Justice Committee if he thinks that his targets will be reached, with my estimate that only 770 would be recruited this year. The Minister did admit that 1,000 will not be recruited this year,” he said.

“I have since received an updated response from the Minister which only puts recruitment at between 600 and 650 this year. This is worse than I thought; this means that more than 1,000 recruits will be needed every year for the next 4 years.”

“If they can’t even come close to 1,000 this year, I don’t know how they are confident that they will be able to recruit more than that for the remaining 4 years,” he remarked.

He said  “I won’t question ambitious targets if there is a genuine attempt to reach them, but if this continues the way it is going, these targets are not ambitious, they are dishonest.”

“There is certainly the right amount of interest from applicants with 6,700 application to become a Garda this year. The fact that only 10% of these numbers will be trained is a failure.”

“Sinn Féin pledged to open a second Garda training college to ensure an intake capacity of 1,500 per year.

“We need safe levels of Garda staffing and with the way things are going for this year, this will not be achieved by Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael.”