THE STATE’S BID to reform how local policing committees are handled at the ground level in towns and cities across the country has been slow, awkward and, as we’ve reported, led to frustrations in several partnerships.

In The Journal’s time looking at the new structures over the past year, it’s also clear that the wider project is sometimes turning into an experiment in hyper-local administration.

This isn’t a bad thing in as centralised a country like Ireland, with some of the fledgling Local Community Safety Partnerships (LCSP) finding ways to plug gaps in housing estates and communities lacking services. 

Each group has the autonomy – and more importantly, a small budget – to come up with ideas to make their area safer, whether it’s to provide places for teenagers to go after school, to get drug users the help they need or to find out what’s driving anti-social behaviour on the ground.

It’s little surprise that the old JPCs were replaced, as they were bloated structures, requiring the attendance of various officials who had no input during the meeting and, in at least one case, could fall asleep in the middle of the three-hour gathering. 

In their place is a group with a slimmer councillor membership, and more emphasis on different state agencies and community representatives.

But there have been clear problems in execution.

Lack of scrutiny 

There have long been complaints from different areas about how difficult it is to scrutinise local state decisions, and now several of the LCSPs have been primarily holding meetings behind closed doors.

It meant the decision to scrap the JPCs has often looked questionable over the past year. Some of those we spoke to over the past year have complained of drift and a lack of focus at their local partnership, which can happen if there is no public (or journalists) to answer. 

Most controversially, several partnerships have decided to regularly hold meetings behind closed doors, with any media scrutiny reduced to second-hand accounts from those at the meeting or, worse, a dry press release.

The only hope here is that, as with the original three pilots which all decided to hold meetings in public, the LCSPs currently meeting behind closed doors will soon become comfortable enough to let the light in.

Better examples

There are some glimmers of hope elsewhere. When The Journal went to Co Longford, there had been enough gloomy reports from other LCSPs that the plan was looking highly troubled.

The Longford team was busy carrying out a public survey in Edgeworthstown when we arrived, and while attendance from the public was small, the group’s ideas were not. Probably more importantly, they were also focused and strategic with what resources they had. 

The local partnership had received feedback from locals about a lack of resources in two separate housing estates, so they worked with their counterparts in Longford County Council to free up a council home in each estate. These homes serve as hubs for different local state agencies, community groups and for kids to use for homework clubs. 

It’s not a revolutionary idea, but it showed a local partnership trying to step in and fill a gap after a lack of services was reported.

The name of these groups hardly captures the imagination, however, and makes them sound like an afterthought for upper levels of the government instead.

And some members feel they often are, even if they were cited by the then justice minister Helen McEntee in the wake of the Dublin riots in 2023. Members of the Dublin pilot expressed concerns over whether the new format meant that councillors were losing their chance to hold senior gardaí accountable for policing decisions in their area.

When The Journal attended one quarterly meeting in Waterford earlier this year, the format was similar to previous JPCs and appeared to allow questioning, so this may bed down as time goes on (even if we are several years into the new structure).

Separate partnerships are also taking different approaches.

In Waterford, a decision was taken early on not to include certain areas such as housing, vacancy and dereliction. For others, such as Longford, vacancy and dereliction were viewed as an essential part of the mix to address community safety.

When speaking to members in some of the LCSPs, some discussed viewing their work differently than when they were on the old JPCs.

Seamus Boylan, who sat on the old JPCs as a senior garda in Longford and now is a chair of the local LCSP, views them as having moved beyond the “talking shop” that existed under the old model. 

It’s also an example of how they have shifted away from focusing purely on the latest crime stats as the main event to something that involves its wider membership.

Funding

The real benefit may lie in something simple: the new groups now have some level of resources.

The last budget saw the government provide €9.5 million for the National Office for Community Safety, which supports the funding of two permanent roles in each LCSP: a dedicated community safety coordinator and an administrator.

Of this, €4 million has been allocated to what’s called the Community Safety Fund, which allows local groups to access supports for measures in their area.

It’s slight in the grand scheme but having full-time staff funding does bring some advantages.

Joe Kelly, a councillor on the Waterford partnership, said having a full-time coordinator is a big step-up on the role being balanced by a councillor or a member of staff who has other responsibilities at the local authority. 

“If the role was being balanced then it wouldn’t go anywhere, to be honest,” Kelly told us.

“You wouldn’t have the time or the concentration to implement things, but having staff permanently there means you have people who can follow the money through grant schemes and bring in more funding for projects.”

In Waterford’s case, some of this grant funding is supporting the creation of a dedicated area for teenagers in an underserved part of the city, where expansion plans had disintegrated following the financial crash.

Could this work around local services have been handled by the council? Perhaps it could have been.

There is an argument though that Waterford is a city that suffered serious job losses after the 2008 crash and spent more than a decade clawing its way back. The local authority also saw the headcount of its departments reduced by a third during the austerity years. 

But there is also a push for more power to land in communities, whether in the likes of Limerick in this country via the office of the first ever directly elected mayor, John Moran, to Andy Burnham in the UK, or to New York mayor Zohran Mamdani. 

All are either trying to ensure more autonomy for regional government, or hoping to use their office to deliver new services for their local areas.

The current LCSPs have been trying to tap into something similar by their hyper-local focus on specific housing estates, but are mainly floating under the radar, partly due to their small budgets and young status.

In the Dáil earlier this year, Green Party leader Roderic O’Gorman warned that the “key deliverable, which is having some element of resources and finance to deliver on the recommendations for a very specific community” may not be realised given current levels of support. 

Even with the dedicated efforts of groups in the likes of Waterford or Longford, the work done by the local community safety partnerships may remain too piecemeal to be transformative.

They may be able to make improvements here and there, but it may be some time and further iterations before they can properly make their mark.