The harsh truth is the cash injections announced in Budget 2024 for the justice and defence sectors may just not be enough.
Justice Minister Helen McEntee – who has €3.5 billion to spend for her whole portfolio – may soon realise that money does not cure every ill.
She and Tánaiste Micheal Martin – who has the Defence portfolio as well as Foreign Affairs – have announced combined budget plans to recruit up to 1,400 security personnel in 2024.
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The Tánaiste, whose Department of Defence has a budget of €1.23 billion, wants some 400 recruits for the Naval Service, Air Corps and Army.
Ms McEntee, for her part, is promising up to 1,000 new gardai. There is no doubt that both arms of the state security apparatus need the recruits – and badly.
At some 7,700 the Defence Forces are at their lowest ebb in decades.
Things are so bad that in the recent seizure of €500 million worth of cocaine off the Cork coast last month, the Naval Service could only deploy one of its six ships on the dangerous operation.
Military experts believe such an operation would have needed two ships – but we could only muster one.
There was just not enough Naval Service personnel for two ships to be devoted to the one operation.
And An Garda Siochana is having the same problem. It has some 13,900 officers at the latest count, which is on the face of it a respectable enough number.
But it masks a crisis of visibility.
The figure does not take into account the fact that in recent years hundreds of officers have been taken off frontline uniform duties and deployed to specialist – but worthy – units.
That means they are no longer carrying out high visibility uniform patrols - and leaves citizens rightly grumbling that they never see a Garda about the place.
And the figures also hide the fact that more gardai are quitting the job than ever before. We already have some 114 resignations this year – compared to just 41 in 2017.
The truth is more and more gardai are fed up with the job: the stress, the grief, the unsociable hours, the massive increase in paperwork and the fear that if they make a mistake they will be either suspended or subjected to an investigation by GSOC, the policing watchdog.
For more and more officers it is simply not worth the hassle and they are voting with their feet - just like the numbers of personnel quitting the Defence Forces.
The government has also announced an increase in the Garda overtime fund from €105 million to €131 million.
Overtime is a vital tool for Garda managers as it allows them to plug the gaps in policing left by the lack of availability of frontline staff due to resignations, retirements – and officers moving away from regular duties to specialist units.
The €26 million increase may sound a lot, but in late July Ms McEntee announced a €10 million hike in overtime for Dublin alone.
And that amount is only meant to last until the end of this year.
The money announced in the budgets for defence and justice were meant to be a cure – but maybe pay is not the whole illness in the organisations.
