Garda overtime budget increases 84% in four years

Gardaí say that the number of protests in the Dublin Metropolitan Region more than doubled last year from the 307 seen in 2022 to 617.

An Garda Síochána’s overtime budget for rank and file officers increased 84% between 2020 and last year, new figures show.

Last year, the force spent €132.2m on out-of-hours payments for gardaí of below sergeant level, compared with €71.7m three years before, an 84% increase.

That €132m spend was also more than €39m more than the cost incurred in 2022, the figures, released to Sinn Féin Galway TD Mairead Farrell, show.

Over €524m has been spent on Garda overtime since 2020, not counting that incurred by gardaí at inspector level.

In the first three months of 2024, €31m was spent on Garda overtime.

The gardaí have faced a retention crisis for several years now, notably in roads policing, where the number of officers has remained static over the past decade.

“I find it amazing that since 2020 over half a billion euro has been spent on overtime,” Ms Farrell said of the figures.

“This is an incredibly sizeable sum, one which speaks to the Government failures around new recruitment,” she said. A Garda spokesperson said that the jump in overtime in 2023 related broadly to two factors: the visit of US president Joe Biden to Ireland in April of that year, and a wholesale increase in the number of protests seen over those 12 months.

Regarding the visit of President Biden, the spokesperson said that the cost of providing security for the three-day visit “could not have been planned for in the 2023 budget as it was only announced a short time before the actual visit”, and that the multi-engagement nature of the presidential visit “required a larger policing and security operation when compared to previous state visits”.

The force said that the number of protests in the Dublin Metropolitan Region had more than doubled last year from the 307 seen in 2022 to 617, with many of those events having resulted from “unforeseen international conflicts” such as the war in Gaza which commenced last October.

“It should also be noted that the nature of protest activity during 2023 was more disruptive than in 2022 with 54 persons arrested in the course of policing 25 protests,” the spokesperson said.

Some 106 of the protests last year in the Dublin Metropolitan Region related to the conflict in Palestine, gardaí said.

The spokesperson did not mention the Dublin riots of November 2023, following which a heavy Garda presence was maintained in central Dublin for several days.