Thread FWIW
The Vienna attacks last night once again put into question how we here in Ireland might manage and confront similar incidents.
The various Austrian LEA were up to it., WEGA got the call and had a terrorist dead within 9 minutes. Could we manage that in Dublin?

Vienna isn't a massively larger city than Dublin in scale or pop, it's not London or Paris, yet it has it's own dedicated very well trained and equipped Police special unit in WEGA, which has more officers in it than the ERU has. The also have the very famous federal police unit.

EKO Cobra, which has several hundred officers, along with that each major region/city has a unit trained by both of those and equipped like them up to and including armored vehicles...and that's before they'd have to call in the military.
We saw a lot of pics from last night of

officers kitted out in heavy body armour, rifles ect, most of those were not from any specialized unit, those were regular officers kitted out and equipped for just such an eventuality. It allows the special units to go about their job while the beat cops can do theirs without..

having to worry if they are going to run into a guy with an AK while all they have is a hat and a smile.
How would we cope with similar here, not enough/large enough helos to lift people in, would we have to wait for the army to roll in with APCs, not enough officers in the ERU

Have to get the wing in......still might not be enough in a city like Dublin...200+- top tier folks to get the job done...the ARU I'm sure would be helpful, but again not enough, and might not be trained up enough for this and could we haul enough of them in from the country?

We won't have 2-3+ hours to wait for folks to drive in from all over. Also the street level Guard is not rolling with a Glock like a cop in Austria is....WTF are they supposed to do?

I'd be surprised if we had the 450 guys EKO Cobra has on its own...

Off the wall idea but establish a special support company in the DF, train equip them to support the ERU/Wing for situations like this and base them in Dublin, armoured vehicles, UAVs, dogs whatever...

I know people will be "it'll never happen here" etc....for some vague logical reason they assign to nihilist psychopaths...

I don't want to wake up 1 Saturday to the news that we got hit & it being full of brave unarmed guards & civilians trying to fight assholes armed with AKs