THE OWNER OF a well-known bar in Dublin has criticised the justice minister for his insistence that the city is safe.

Ian Redmond, who runs Hyde Bar, said Dublin has a “feral ambience” at present as he urged for more to be done to address issues in the capital.

He said Dublin previously had a “playful” atmosphere at night but that existing problems were “exacerbated” by the pandemic, with a “huge drugs element” adding to problems in the city.

Redmond was responding to remarks made on Thursday by minister Jim O’Callaghan, who had insisted that Dublin is “very safe” in the wake of a violent assault on Grafton Street in the early hours of Thursday morning.

The Fianna Fáil minister had said that there’s a “greater sense of safety” around the city as he pointed to new high visibility policing and increased numbers coming into An Garda Síochána.

“Dublin is a very large city. There’s over a million people in Dublin. We are going to have incidents that happen in Dublin of criminal behaviour,” O’Callaghan has said Thursday.

The Dublin Bay South TD also told reporters that no government “can ensure that there won’t be criminal activity within Dublin”, but that it was at a “very low level” compared to other cities around the world.

“This year, to date, in Ireland, there has not been one gun-related killing. I mentioned that to a series of federal attorneys general from the United States who were over here. They presumed I had got it wrong,” O’Callaghan said.

Speaking this morning on Newstalk to Anton Savage, Redmond said that O’Callaghan and his predecessor Helen McEntee had both claimed that Dublin remains safe overall despite violent incidents, which the bar owner said was not borne out by his experiences.

“Both of them have said that Dublin is a safe place – it’s not. Since Covid there is a feral ambience or mood in the city, it’s not the way it was,” Redmond said.

He added that a “doughnut effect” had seen the city centre emptied out of people residing in the city on a full-time basis, which he argued had deepened safety issues at night.

The question of whether Dublin is safe has been central to the new system of Local Community Safety Partnerships, which were set up to replace Joint Policing Committtees. 

The government has set up 36 groups around the country, with one in each local authority area. Last month, a public meeting of the South Dublin Local Community Safety Partnership (LCSP) group highlighted issues with antisocial behaviour, garda shortages and fear and intimidation. 

Issues that came up repeatedly during the round-table discussion included bins and bushes being set on fire, open drug use in public places, and opportunistic crime. 

The Journal’s reporting of the new Local Community Safety Partnerships is supported by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.