The Garda Strike

This is disgraceful. Rents increase in Dublin by 16% in the past year and these dirty communists in the public sector think they should have a rent allowance and an increment increase of a few percent. Bastard gardaí and teachers! Why can't they work hard like property owners do in Dublin - all of whom at least worked 16% harder in the past year, of course? This idea that ordinary people should have increases in salary to reflect the greater cost of gouging by landlords and the like is dangerous left-wing nonsense, our beloved "free press" will tell us.

Meanwhile we are privileged to have learned people like Edward Walsh, formerly head of the University of Limerick, paid by RTÉ with our TV license money to come on television and to write in papers to tell us that gardaí, teachers and all are overpaid. I especially love that our glorious free press, the heroic defenders of democracy that are journalists, never, ever mention that this is the same Ed Walsh who received well over €300,000 tax free (€275,000 in 1997 money) from public funds upon his retirement from UL, and each year for the past 19 years he has been in receipt of well over €100,000 per year as a pension. A pension. And this is the person RTÉ brings out to tell us teachers, gardaí and other lower-paid public servants are overpaid. Vomit-inducing stuff.(Source)

As a consequence Walsh would have received, in 1997, a final lump sum of £225,000 (or €285,750) in addition to an annual pension top up of approximately €100,000 since 1997.

PS: Great to see our fantastically rightwing Blueshirt government (with loving support from the mé féiner guttersnipes in Fianna Fáil, Labour and Sinn Féin - all of whom could unite and kick them out if they so chose) continues to do sweet fúck all in Dublin to upset the property developers/housebuilders/banks by - perish the thought - engaging in a massive program of public house building just as Irish governments used to do - in five years of the depression of the 1930s Fianna Fáil built over 100,000 houses for Irish families, for instance - before these rightwing Thatcherite "no such thing as society" fúcktards got this society by the balls and made spending public money on public housing a bad thing. But spending money on reducing apartment sizes, VAT and other taxes on builders, and handing money to first-time buyers so that the money will go straight into the pocket of said developers (and their offshore accounts, as usual - but shhhh that only happened in the 1990s; Irish business people don't do that anymore!) who will increase price of said houses by precisely the same amount as this new Fine Gael "grant" is all par for the course in this brave new Irish society. Start supplying houses in Dublin at affordable prices, and numerous pressures on wages and the like dissipate almost immediately. The vested interests do not want that, so we hear groans from the public sectors and others who have the sense to be unionised against these powerful vested interests.

If you're determined to find a public sector target, go after the pensions of all senior public servants - all of which comes out of the state's current expenditure. For instance, John Bruton has been on a pension each year - last year alone worth €135,000 - since he was 34 years old in 1983. 33 years on an enormous pension. 33 fúcking years (he also has other massive pensions, such as his EU one). Refúcking read that! And these arseholes and the vacuous shít-for-brains who defend them in the media and in online fora think it's fair game to attack public servants like gardaí and teachers who could only dream of such a gravy train. Look at the salary of a garda/teacher/nurse and look at the price of houses in Dublin - they'll be renting here forever unless an Irish government decides to tackle all the vested interests that are keeping housing supply constrained in Dublin. Man up, and get stronger targets in society for your rage. Hypocritical, elitist shítehawking from a media which is breathtakingly hypocritical and in the service of an elite. Poorer public servants should follow the lead of senior public servants like our former government ministers and demand increases in everything. More examples of elitist hypocrisy on public servants pay.

Time to make a stand against the well-connected getting richer and using the media to reject all claims from poorer workers for increases. Long past it, actually.

the thing is, people do want to be guards. lots of people do. It's a childhood dream for some, to join the police.
However, many people who would be very good Gardai don't join because they can get more money for less sacrifice elsewhere.
There are lots of new recruits that are resigning because they can't manage on the wages. Those people really wanted to be guards, they really wanted to make a difference, they wanted it to work & tried for as long as they could, before leaving to go back to work in molloys off licence or wherever!
The point is, there are lots of applicants but this doesn't necessarily mean that they will all go through with the application, or even if they do, that they will stay in the job.