Such “local community safety partnerships” are being rolled out nationwide, generating both hope – and criticism.
Two new community safety forums in Fingal had their first meetings early this week – one for Fingal North and one for Fingal West.
They had been a long-time coming.
The local community safety partnerships (LCSPs) have been set up to replace the old joint policing committees (JPCs), and try a new broader approach to policing and community safety.
But the JPCs were stood down in June 2024 in Fingal – and for 20 months, nothing replaced them.
“It's like stopping the bus service before you’ve got a train between two areas,” said Labour Party Councillor Brian McDonagh last April.
Now, both partnerships have elected chairpersons and vice-chairpersons and have a year to draw up community safety plans for their areas.
The chairperson for the Fingal West partnership, Philip Jennings says the new body is excited to get to work but that it will be a case of “learning by doing”, as things get underway this year.
Jennings is 20 years working in community safety, he said on Wednesday in Koffee and Kale Café, in the Draíocht Theatre in Blanchardstown.
He is currently the community safety coordinator with the Blanchardstown Drugs and Alcohol Taskforce, he says.
“Everybody is fully behind this LCSP and want to see this work. And it will work,” Jennings says, taking a sip from his decaf americano.
The inaugural meeting was mostly just for everyone to get together and introduce themselves. The real work has yet to begin, and with just a year for each LCSP to produce its own community safety plan, the clock is already ticking.
The old and wound-up JPC had been a forum for gardaí to relay local crime statistics, and share bits and pieces about significant arrests and ongoing operations with councillors and council officials.
Jennings sat on it, he says.
There was one for all of Fingal, says Jennings, so members couldn’t drill into any detail around how one particular community could address any issue.
Gardaí would reel through reports from each district line by line, he says. There was little time for anything more, he says.
“I'm from Blanchardstown listening to a garda from Baldoyle giving a report about what’s going on there,” he says.
The local community safety partnerships will be less broadcast and more a conversation, he says. They’re a collaborative approach to public safety, says Jennings.
In Fingal West, councillors sit along with representatives from Tusla and the local chamber of commerce, he says. Other members represent the Traveller community and the education sector, he says.
This collaborative approach is one he is familiar with from his decades working in community safety and one, he says, that works.
It’s important to consider problems from different angles, he says.
That’s exactly what the members hope to do, says Jennings – to sit around the table together and figure out how each organisation represented can add towards a solution for whatever problems arise, before they escalate.
If there is a high-rate of burglaries in an area, he says, that is of course an issue for the gardaí.
But if you consider something as purely a garda problem, it's put into a silo, he says. “The role of the community safety partnership is to say to the gardaí, ‘Well, what can we do to help you?’”
Each person on the partnership should try and consider how they, in their own work, can help to reduce those burglaries, he says. “There’s lots of different things that the partners can bring to the table. So, it's about teasing them out.”
McDonagh isn’t a member of either local community safety partnership.
But he hopes they will lead to a more proactive approach to issues like anti-social behaviour, when councillors raise that, he says.
“It’s a case of trying to get a balance of community policing that you're able to identify problems before they arise,” he says.
For low-level issues, it can be difficult to have them addressed before they reach a certain threshold, he says.
Each partnership can only accommodate seven councillors. But the views and concerns of all councillors will be given airtime at the partnership meetings when relayed through their council colleagues, says Jennings.
Fine Gael Councillor Luke Corkery has been appointed to the Fingal North Local Community Safety Partnership.
Tackling perceptions that an area is not safe is also an important function of the partnership going forward, he said.
“How do you help people feel safe? That can be through investment in town centres. It can be investment in facilities, youth centres,” he says.
Dereliction can give people a sense that a place isn’t safe also, he says – and that’s something that can be tackled head-on.
He looks forward to seeing how the different agencies come together and bounce around ideas, he said. “Let's see how it works.”
As it stands, much of what he hears from constituents is that they simply want more police out and about and visible, he says.
In Dublin City Council, there has been rumbling disquiet among some councillors around the set-up of the new partnership.
Labour Councillor Dermot Lacey said last year that he was sceptical that capping the number of councillors and adding representatives from government bodies would lead to improved community safety.
“If you had HSE and Tusla and bodies like that on the new community safety fora, as equal partners, they’re not answerable,” he said.
“The Oireachtas health committee doesn't have the HSE sitting on as equal partners. The Oireachtas health committee questions the HSE and questions what the role of the HSE is, and what the HSE do,” he said.
There will be fewer councillors to question the Gardaí, the HSE, Tusla, and other bodies – and more representatives of statutory bodies sitting on the committee, who are unlikely to criticise each other, Lacey said.
Outside of the new partnerships, councillors should also have regular meetings with gardaí in alternative forums, says Dublin City Councillor Janet Horner.
Horner was a member of a 24-month safety partnership that was trialled in the North Inner-City beginning in 2021.
There is currently no structure legislated for that facilitates this, she said at last October’s monthly meeting of Dublin City Council.
In her experience, from the north inner-city pilot partnership, far more is achieved and actioned by councillors talking directly to gardaí, than from meetings with 20 or 30 voices, she said by phone last October.
“It is incumbent on us as a council to maintain that. It is essential for the safety of the city and to look beyond the limitations of the community safety partnership model – which does not facilitate proper engagement of that type,” said Horner.
In Fingal though, the focus now is on coming up with tailored community safety plans for each area, says Corkery, the Fine Gael councillor. “There's been a lot of talk about what it will look like.”
Jennings, chair of the Fingal West partnership, says that as the partnership continues, members will be open to feedback on what is working or what isn’t.
As Jennings takes a last sip from his decaf Americano, he reiterates the motto he says he’s picked up in his years of social work: “Learn by doing”.
Meanwhile, the National Office for Community Safety, which will oversee the local community safety partnerships, is now working on Ireland’s first National Strategy for Improving Community Safety, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice says.
People can weigh in on what should be included, in its online survey, which runs until 5pm on 27 February.
Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.
The council says it wants to hear from you.
In order to ensure the continuation of life on this planet, everybody has to get involved, says Grace Collier, a member of the school’s Eco Committee.
“It’s not that the people who live there don’t have cars,” he says. “It’s that the neighbourhood is not a car park, and the car parking is on the edge.”
The change may mean the pitches can withstand more use, but it also means they won’t absorb as much rain, or sustain as many creatures, they say.
