Gardaí are leaving the force due to bullying, work-related stress and concerns they don’t have the resources to properly investigate crime, according to a new study.

Latest figures show that 106 Gardaí have left the force so far this year – more than double the number of people who left in 2017.

Over the weekend, the Garda Representative Association (GRA) published a new report based on exit interviews with 40 Gardaí who left the force last year.

The organisation said the report found "a worrying work culture where bullying, mental stress, burnout, and a sense of vulnerability are rife".

"Very worrying"

On Newstalk Breakfast this morning report author and Assistant to the General Secretary of the GRA Tara McManus said the report includes “a number of very worrying findings”.

“I found three main reasons why people were leaving," she said.

“When I talk to people, they give maybe five or six reasons why they left but the one most people talked about was feeling bullied – feeling that they had been subjected to unfair treatment and the threat of discipline constantly hanging over them.

“The second reason given by people was work-related stress or mental health or burnout.

“Then their reason was just feeling that the workload was too much. That they didn’t have enough resources to do the work and they didn’t have enough time to properly investigate the incidents that they had.”

"A career for life"

Ms McManus warned that almost 60% of the people she interviewed were leaving the force after giving five years’ service or less.

She said a career in the Gardaí was traditionally “a career for life” and the numbers leaving now, while far smaller than those leaving organisations in other sectors are “unprecedented”.

“We have never seen numbers this high,” she said.

“We are up at 120 this year already and we are only in October so the numbers are getting higher and higher every year.”

Gardaí

She said the worrying thing for the force is that people are not leaving for the same reasons they might leave jobs in other sectors.

“This has nothing to do with the pandemic, this has nothing to do with globalisation,” she said.

“All the reasons that have been identified why people are leaving are internal Garda issues. Things that only An Garda Síochána can fix.”

Ms McManus said the number of people leaving the force may be small, but it is concerning when you have a force that is “completely understaffed and under-resourced as it is”.

“We are struggling to get people into the Garda College, we are struggling to get people to actually join the Gardaí so the last thing we want to be doing is losing the people we have and that we have invested into and that have trained and actually put the time in,” she said.