How hard is it to fire someone

Unless they're relatively new, and whomever they're reporting to has had the minerals to refuse to sign off on their probation, the answer is it's possible, but will probably take ages.

That being said, if someone is literally not turning up (are they office based?) when they're supposed to, that might make it a bit more expedient. Is the person pulling sickies (6 uncerts in 3 years is the max), claiming they have COVID, burning up all their annual leave, or just shrugging when they're asked where they were yesterday?

oh the irony

I've seen it a handful of times. They were managed out. Given awful jobs and no promotion or increments. Almost all left eventually.

They can, but the discrimination laws still apply.

I worked in a company where an man maybe 15 years older than the rest of our team was hired. A few months in we determined it wasn't working out, but HR wanted a whole lot of actions from us so that when we eventually let him go, he couldn't say we did it due to his age.

Remember no company wants their name in the paper over something like this, so never think you have a free pass within the probation period.

I'm public sector and we get 4 uncerts (self certs) a year. That would 12 in 3 years. There are specific rules as to how you can take them though. I don't think there's many employees who don't use all 4 days each year.

There's a well known story about one employee in the company who took no sick days throughout his whole career. Close to retirement he went up to have a meeting with the head manager along with a union rep. They asked if there was anything they could do to acknowledge this. He was told 'no', and that "those days are there to be taken"!

I think that's different just killing time until the next bus arrives. Be that retirement or a new job.

How many of those are genuinely fixed term project, though. The engineer might be, they're probably building something specific. But the public arts and literacy needs are not going away at the end of N years.

It's just a bit silly to keep banging on with the tired old trope that tries to position public service staff as some kind of different race with different motivations to others. Don't most employees, public and private sector, want to "grab as much as possible"? Aren't all those calls for small government and reduced taxation 'willing to risk the education, welfare and health of of Irish citizens'? This kind of stereotyping is fairly lame.
Public servants aren't a different race. They're a broad church, with all kinds of different motivations. The main thing they have in common would be that if they really wanted to 'grab as much as possible', they'd be working elsewhere.
You've clearly no personal experience of sick leave practices within public service.

I'm not sure if you've heard of the concept of 'strikes' or 'industrial disputes', where staff withdraw their labour which generally result in withholding of services, whether that's flights abroad or call centre phone answering or indeed (in contradiction of your claim) plumbing services; https://www.thejournal.ie/construction-site-strike-august-2024-6471797-Aug2024/
You may also have missed the fact that the last couple of decades have largely been peaceful in terms of industrial disputes in the public sector.
If the best you have to rely on is 'everyone knows', the standard Liveline trope, you're not getting very far.
As for morals and motivation, wait till you find out about how many people work in both sectors, sometimes at the same time, and sometimes chopping and changing sectors as suits them. They're the same people

"…..the upper echleons of the scale…" suggests a reading age of 12.

Why try to use big words when it's clear that you (a) don't understand their meaning and (b) can't even spell them correctly?

The 'general public at large' was unaffected by the Aer Lingus strike, but yet the general public at large was somehow affected by a small number of deferred medical procedures? Don't suppose you'd like to show your workings there. It's really funny to see you shifting your goalposts desperately as each of your nonsensical claims is pointed out. Where's the monopoly of medical services, btw? Presumably you've heard about the private medical sector, which for all it's faults, does actually exist? Oh yes, you mentioned private healthcare just two lines after you mentioned 'their monopoly', directly contradicting yourself within the same post.

And how did you decide that morality was just about 'refusing to work'? You said that morality = continuity of supply, but there's obviously a huge amount of supply problems there. Where's the morality in hiking up drug prices to extreme levels totally unaffordable to all but the privileged few, and also milking money out of governments desperate to do their best for unwell people - in other words, an average day's work in the pharma sector. How come your beloved private sector staff of 'stronger morals' have no difficulty in creaming governments?

'Plenty of alternatives'? I take it you didn't see all the news coverage of people stranded, of people losing half of their wedding parties, of people who missed their appointments for life saving operations?

What public service 'was stopped completely' btw?

I presume you're just going to ignore the question of drug pricing creaming money out of governments for greedy pharma execs, just like you ignored the question of the finance industry leaders with 'strong morals' that bankrupted our country sending us cap in hand to the IMF?

It didn't really stand up to scrutiny, did it? The whole 'morals = continuity of supply' nonsense?

The fairly obvious answer as to why many people use private health services in Ireland, about 50%, compared to about 15% in the UK, is because of backlogs and queues due to underfunding. People die waiting for access to underfunded public services here, so lots of people who can afford private health insurance will take it. It's nothing to do with the supposed morals or otherwise of staff on either side.

I can imagine that you're quite keen that I don't explain any more, given that each of your claims has been exposed as nonsense. It's only inside your head that morals = continuity of supply. The real world is just a bit more complex than that, where your simplistic claims appear nonsensical and childish.

Thanks for proving my point about simplistic claims that appear nonsensical and childish.

And off we go again;

hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha