What are your personal experiences with the Gardai

Yours?

Majority are good at what they do, some are useless at what they do.

Great bunch of lads.

Only dealings I’ve ever had with Garda is when they’ve stamped my passport forms.
If you find yourself frequented with the Guards more than the average person, well there’s probably a reason for that.

They are there to protect the state

Fcuk around with the state and see what happens

Civilian stuff apart from state revenue collection exercises not so good

Shifted a ban guard one night. Grand lass.

Sleeper12 wrote: »

You treat them with respect and they treat you with respect.

Not necessarily true in life unfortunately

Couple of years ago my house got burgled. They stole my phone amongst other things, brought it home and took a few photos of themselves with it which got backed up automatically to my google account. A couple of days afterwards I saw this and put it together. I printed out the photos and brought it down to blanchardstown station, thinking this would help the garda catch the fellas who did it. Location services on my google account could help with locating them. So anyway guards in blanch thanked me. I heard nothing back. A month later I look out one morning and my car is gone. Unbeknownst to me they had nicked my spare key during the robbery. Guards come around later (hours later) after I report it stolen. I tell them I have an idea who did it and show them the previous photos - the response “ah we know these fellas, they’re travellers from Damastown, we’ll go around and see if your car is there”. It wasn’t. Long and short of it you can basically give them photos of who robbed you and where they went and still get nowhere.
Separate incident - Roll forward a couple of months and my missus gets knocked off her bike outside the four courts by someone opening the door of a taxi...that pretty rapidly left the scene. One of the security guards from the four courts was very nice to her and helped her get to James hospital. She reported it to the guards, and suggested they requested the CCTV from the four courts. She gets a call a week later from the guards to say they’d spoke to the security in the four courts and there was no CCTV of the incident. She left it at that but then a few days later decides to go down to the four courts and talk to security herself about the CCTV. When she gets down she talks to them “yeah we have the CCTV here, we are waiting to hear from the guards”.

Pretty useless overall would be my general impression. They’re pretty good at the low hanging fruit - busting people for drugs, hassling homeless people on the street, checking tax on cars, water protests, policing demos, evictions, etc, but when it comes to real police work, I’m not so sure.

Do a great job in spite of being used as a political football. Under resourced and underpaid.