Poland’s Interior Min-istry is partially withdrawing from its earlier planned radical reform of the retirement scheme for police officers.Currently 100,000 police officers are entitled to retire after just 15 years of work. In 2007, every fifth police officer who decided to retire was below the age of 40.
At the beginning of the year, Interior Minister Grzegorz Schetyna announced that police officers will have to work for a further 10 years before retirement.
Thousands of Polish police officers, border guards and other officials have staged protests against the proposed changes to their retirement privileges.
And it appears this pressure has forced the minister to review his plans, with the retirement limit set to extend by just five years.
Polish people in Ireland have vented their frustrations at the minister’s backstepping on his reform proposals.
“I think that is so unfair and really smells like corruption,” said Alizia Rudkowski, from Katowitz and living in Dublin for four years. “Everybody else has to work longer, only the police get to retire early. So why shouldn’t police officers work longer as well? Besides it costs Poland so much money to let them go early.”
“I think 15 years are very short,” added a Dublin-based Garda who cannot be named for legal reasons. “In Ireland it’s 30 years… I think if people only get a half-pension it’s all right to retire early. So I think the government there should just make the pension on a ratio with the amount of time they actually spent (on the job).”
The current retirement scheme for police and army officials costs Polish taxpayers some zl9bn (€2bn) annually. The new scheme will only affect those officers who will begin working in 2011.
