Having switched from a career as a Montessori teacher and cut short her stint working in Africa to come home and take up her place as a trainee garda, Rachael Killeen admitted that donning the blue uniform for the first time hammered home the responsibility now on her shoulders.
"We got kitted out last Thursday and I had the uniform on all weekend to get used to it," she joked when meeting the media at the Garda College, Templemore, Co Tipperary yesterday.
The 27-year-old, from Newmarket-on-Fergus, Co Clare, could have applied to join the Garda before the recruitment embargo was introduced five years ago. But when recruitment was then stopped she was forced to wait until this year, when 25,000 people applied. “I felt I was too young before and that you need plenty of life experience first,” she said. Her father and other members of her family were gardaí. “I’m going into it eyes wide open.”
Most recently she has been living in Africa, working as a sports development officer in an orphanage and school in Zambia and South Africa.
“It’s very much learning by doing, very practical,” Ms Killeen said of the new BA in applied policing that the new class of 100 recruits will graduate with. The recruits started training just last week.
They are the first intake for five years, with Garda recruitment having been stopped as part of the public sector recession-related moratorium.
Critical
The reforms in training and recent policing controversies have not bypassed former off-licence manager
David Hickey
. The 25-year-old from Shankill, south Dublin, said the new training would in part be about questioning things and critical thinking. With a management qualification already to his name from Dublin Institute of Technology, Mr Hickey was hopeful that some of what he had seen in the job he left to become a garda will stand him in good stead. “You do see a certain amount of aggression,” he said of managing an off-licence.
Another new recruit, Sean White, from Tallaght, Dublin, is one of 24 new recruits to have worked as a Garda reservist in recent years. He has been posted to Sundrive Road station in Crumlin, Dublin, and had amassed more than four years service as an unpaid part-timer before applying for the force proper earlier this year. "I expect it to be challenging and intense. I know how robust policing can be," he said.
Dublin is the county of origin of 26 in the new class; with 12 from Galway, eight from Cork and six from Limerick. All other counties have five recruits or less. One is listed as being from outside the State; that trainee is from Suffolk, England.
The recruits, 11 of whom have fluent Irish, will spend 32 weeks at the Garda College before being sent to stations. They will have full Garda powers at that stage but must continue training for 72 weeks.
