Council says it will facilitate community-safety forum meetings, following calls from councillors

Councillors last week called on the council to organise meetings to bring together public representatives and community groups with Gardaí, while they all wait for the new local community safety partnerships to be set up around the city.

“It’s important that we have a structure where people are held to account, can voice concerns and have questions answered,” said Sinn Féin Councillor Daithí Doolan, at a meeting of the council’s South Central Area Committee on 19 February.

The Policing, Security and Community Safety Act 2024 came into effect last year, to establish local community safety partnerships in each county. The plan is for these to replace the longstanding joining policing committees (JPCs).

But the citywide JPC has stopped meeting, and the local community safety partnerships are not yet up and running.

Doolan said the council had agreed to hold meetings in place of the outgoing JPC structure in the interim, but has not yet done so – leaving gaps in communication.

“We see dangerous actors filling that void on social media and elsewhere,” said Doolan at the meeting.

Independent councillor Vincent Jackson, who chairs the committee, said, “We do see the escalation of areas of the city which are of serious concern to all of us.”

The committee agreed to write to the Lord Mayor, Fine Gael Councillor Emma Blain, to request that she organise a citywide joint policing committee meeting.

On Tuesday, a spokesperson for Dublin City Council said that local JPC meetings are taking place and that the council will convene a meeting to cover issues that affect the whole city too in the coming months.

“The Executive is now proposing to regularise a new City-wide Community Safety Forum,” says the spokesperson – after an initial meeting took place to which all councillors were invited.

Council staff will meet Garda management with the Lord Mayor this month, and aim to schedule a meeting for March or April, says the spokesperson.

Replacing Joint Policing Committees

The north inner-city was one of three national pilot projects, starting in 2021, for the new local community safety partnerships.

Green Party Councillor Janet Horner sat on the partnership, but said in November she was not convinced the model was working.

“You are losing something by getting rid of the JPC structure”, so it’s important to be certain that the partnership is better, Horner said.

The role of the Gardaí in the partnership is a bit unclear, she said. “The relationship with the Gardaí is ambiguous at the moment.”

Criminologist Trina O’Connor said she was surprised that the chairperson of the partnership is not a paid job. “If we plan to take community safety seriously, we have to resource it.”

The participants surveyed for an evaluation of the pilot said that the partnership provided a forum for inter-agency collaboration, but that it needed more resources and better staffing to be a success.

For Pilot X, which appears to be the north inner-city, many respondents were unsure whether the community safety partnership had improved the sense of safety in the community, improved actual safety, or made services more accountable to the community.

At a council meeting in May 2024 some councillors said that the changeover was causing confusion and that the councillors were being edged out of the process.

Labour Councillor Dermot Lacey said that the change in structure was eroding democracy because the new chairperson will be a public appointee, not a political one, and that person will invite the members and set the agenda. “Democratic accountability will be out the window,” said Lacey.

But Fine Gael’s James Geoghegan – then a councillor, now a TD – called on councillors to give the new structures a chance.

“We just have to allow that system to take hold,” he said “The objective is in fact to improve the widest possible engagement in the community.”

Does the gap matter?

At a full council meeting in July, Geoghegan was elected Lord Mayor.

He said at that meeting that he had agreed with the council managers that the council would continue to run a policing forum in the interim while the new partnerships were established.

“So members could still have a framework of direct engagement [with Gardaí] similar or akin to the joint policing committee,” he says. “That has been agreed.”

The Lord Mayor would chair it and local area committees would nominate the members to it, said Geoghegan, at the meeting.

The last time the citywide joint policing committee met was in May 2024, according to the council’s website.

But the council spokesperson says Geoghegan held an initial meeting and invited all councillors to attend.

That must have been between July when he was elected Lord Mayor, and November when he was elected to the Dáíl.

Doolan says the council needs to put community safety back on the agenda. “We want to make the city safe for everybody,” said Doolan. “To do that we need to work together.”

Independent Councillor Mannix Flynn said at the July meeting that the JPCs should keep running until the local community safety partnerships are fully established and operational.

Speaking by phone on Tuesday, Flynn, a longstanding member of the city-wide JPC, says that the structure worked well in facilitating local residents groups to engage formally with Gardaí.

“It wasn’t just neighbourhood watch, it was formal, it was statutory,” he says. “Now we are in a kind of limbo, there is nothing there.”

Flynn says the business community still has a structured forum to meet Gardaí but residents and public representatives do not.

O’Connor, the criminologist, says the original forum shouldn’t be stood down until there is something up and running to replace it. “If it doesn’t matter, why have [they] set them up in the first place?”

The gap between one ending and the other starting would delay progress that the committee was making and potentially leave a vacuum for information, says O’Connor.

“In the vacuum is where we see people acting in anti-social ways and against societal norms,” she says.