“It’s a job worth doing”.
That’s the line from An Garda Síochána as they recruit for The Garda Reserve.
It comprises volunteers drawn from the community to assist Gardaí in various duties – Garda Lisa Mullins says; “Garda Reserves they assist the Gardaí with various duties and they perform various policing tasks, you might have seen some of them working at Bruce Springsteen there a couple of weeks ago, they help with traffic duty and various things so we’re just appealing to anyone who might have an interest in volunteering within their community and helping their local community to go into publicjobs.ie and start the process in applying for the Garda Reserve”.
She adds those interested will be shown what to do, noting; “You get training, a kind of a blended approach within the training so you’d have a bit with garda college, online stuff and then you would actually be sent out to various stations, assigned to various stations and learning what kind of roles to do so it’s eligible to anyone between the ages of 18 and 60 years of age, anyone that comes from a country within the European Union or Swiss Confederation or have been legally in the country for the last five years”.
And Garda Mullins says while not paid, those who sign up will have expenses covered and there are other benefits both to the reserves and the force in general; “We will actually have a few stands around Kilkenny and Carlow in the next week or so or even pop into your local Garda Station if you’re interested; it’s a great way too for younger people I suppose if they want to join the guards and see what it is actually like and get an idea before they start the process of being a guard, you know when we have busy days like match traffic, anything like that, they’re a massive assistance to us in our daily roles and eases some of our workload as well”.
