Despite councillors’ reservations after pilot in north inner-city, government rolling out local community safety partnerships

The Department of Justice intends to set up local community safety partnerships throughout Ireland in the coming months, councillors were told last week.

These will aim to make communities safer by bringing together the guards, social services, drugs services, locals residents, and public representatives to brainstorm and oversee ways to tackle anti-social behaviour and crime more holistically.

The government has piloted the method for the last couple of years in three spots: Dublin’s north-east inner-city, Longford and Waterford.

“I do think there is huge potential there for something like this, but I do have some very, very serious concerns about how this model is working,” said Green Party Councillor Janet Horner, who has been involved in the Dublin pilot.

That the central government is rolling the model out nationally was a point of contention for local councillors, including Horner, at a meeting of the Dublin City Joint Policing Committee (JPC) on 25 March.

They queried the success of the pilot in the north inner-city, flagging issues with the level of participation in the new structures there as well as how the partnerships in general will be resourced, and chairpersons selected.

In response to the criticisms, Eddie Mullins, the chairperson of the Dublin North Inner-City Local Community Safety Partnership, said on Tuesday: “I see the merits of the partnership. There is progress being made.”

Nationwide roll-out

At the committee meeting on 25 March, Ben Ryan, head of policy for criminal justice at the Department of Justice, said there will be at least one partnership within each local authority area in Ireland.

Each partnership will be run by a paid coordinator and an administrator, Ryan said. And it’ll have a voluntary independent chairperson.

The department will start recruiting the coordinators and administrators in April, Ryan said, and hopes to start appointing chairpersons to each new partnership in June.

“The partnerships will look to foster sustained community involvement in identifying the needs, and co-designing solutions, and a sustained commitment from services working together to address those needs,” he said.

The department is also setting up a National Office for Community Safety to offer  training, guidance and other support to local community safety partnerships, Ryan said at the meeting.

Ryan didn’t say how many partnerships there may be in Dublin city.

Reducing councillors’ role

Labour Councillor Dermot Lacey said the partnerships diminish the role of councillors compared to the existing structures –  the JPCs – because not all local representatives will be invited to them.

“It is a massive attack on local government and local democracy,” said Lacey at the meeting.

JPCs bring together councillors and council officials with Gardaí. All local councillors are invited to attend.

Lacey said later on the phone that he thinks legislation allows for seven councillors to sit on each new partnership. But there are 17 councillors representing Dublin City Council’s South East Area, he says.

He also objects to the chairperson being chosen by civil servants, he said, arguing that public bodies should be answerable to elected representatives. “Councillors should refuse to engage with these structures,” says Lacey.

Problems with participation

Horner, the Green Party councillor, said at the meeting that she supports the partnership approach because it draws a wider range of stakeholders than the current JPCs.

She participated in the partnership pilot in the north east inner-city, she says, and was excited at first about the potential of the wider forum to have an impact on community safety. But, she said, in practise, the level of participation wasn’t good.

That was a concern raised in an interim evaluation in April 2023 of the partnerships, done by the Centre for Effective Services at the University of Limerick.

It noted, without specifying which project, “a downward shift in commitment to the LCSP [local community safety partnership] on the part of members with a call for more active engagement and involvement of the representatives from statutory agencies”.

Gardaí in the north inner-city have not bought into the process, said Horner at the meeting and nor have most local councillors. “We don’t have serious buy-in from the residents either,” she said.

Garda Assistant Commissioner Angela Willis said Gardaí were participating fully in the partnership but that they cannot resolve all the issues alone.

Horner said she would retract the statement that Gardaí had not fully bought into the partnership process.

Ryan, the policy head at the Department of Justice, agreed that there was an issue with some public representatives not participating in the north inner-city.

Getting people more engaged

Sinn Féin Councillor Daithí Doolan said that community and resident representatives need to be provided with support and training to fully participate in the partnership.

There will be a budget provided for training community representatives, said Ryan, of the Department of Justice.

Social Democrats Councillor Tara Deacy said the partnerships need more resources to succeed. The chairperson should be a paid role, to attract and keep people with the right skills, she said.

She also said that getting real engagement from community representatives could be challenging when many of them are fearful or could face intimidation.

“There is a huge amount of work that has to go into that if we want it to be meaningful and truthful and not tokenistic,” says Deacy.

Doolan, the Sinn Féin councillor, called on other councillors to participate in the partnership for the good of communities.

The structure is not the one that Sinn Féin would have put in place, he said, but the consequences are too serious for communities if elected representatives opt out.

“If I’m lucky enough to be reelected I’d be certainly driving this with every ounce of energy I have, to make sure that it’s a success,” he said.

All councillors should do the same, he said, given the depth of challenges facing neighbourhoods.

“Not just anti-social behaviour but really serious criminality, drug-related intimidation, criminals trying to control communities, holding them to ransom as we’ve seen across Dublin,” he said.

What has been learnt?

Horner said she was surprised that the department is rolling out the partnerships nationwide before the final evaluation of the pilots has been published.

“I want this to work,” Horner said at the meeting. “But unless there is a serious element of reflecting where the problems lie, publishing the evaluation and making it accountable to everybody involved, I don’t see that happening.”

Ryan said that the department had learned lessons from the initial and interim evaluations.

The final evaluation was done but was light on details, he said, so they have asked for more analysis and will publish it when that is finished.

Ryan said at the meeting that getting the right chairperson is essential to the success of a partnership. That’s one learning from the pilots, he said.

Since it launched in February 2021, a co-ordinator and a chairperson resigned from the north inner-city partnership.

Despite some councillors’ reservations about the structure, Mullins, the chairperson of  the north inner-city partnership, said he can see it making a difference.

“I accept that councillors have a view but I don’t think it’s entirely fair,” he said.

There are community representatives engaging with the partnership, he says, but some local councillors haven’t shown up to any meetings.

The north inner-city partnership set up subgroups to work on things like the environment and delivering community safety initiatives in schools, Mullins says.

It has hired community safety wardens and is relaying information from Gardaí to the community and vice versa.

“The nature of the issue and the scale of the problem does make it more complex than some other areas,” he says.