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IN THE FEBRILE political atmosphere that followed the Dublin riots in November 2023, then Minister for Justice Helen McEntee sought to reassure the Dáil that she had law and order in the capital firmly in hand.
“I am responding,” McEntee insisted, of the issues facing Dublin city centre.
With the threat of a motion of no confidence hanging over her, McEntee listed the actions she had taken – among them, “a new community safety partnership in the north inner city”.
McEntee said the initiative, for which she took credit, was “bringing everyone around the table to focus on safety” including businesses, the city council, the HSE, community organisations, public representatives and “many others”.
But away from the blaze of political and media scrutiny to which McEntee was subject, when the north inner city Local Community Safety Partnership (LCSP) met a few days later, it faced strong criticism from within the ranks of its own members, minutes show.
Green Party councillor Janet Horner recalls: “My proposal in December 2023 was: this isn’t working. We do not have the power to do what we need to do for our community to improve safety.”
Along with similar committees in Waterford and Longford, the Dublin north inner city LCSP was established as a pilot by the Department of Justice during the pandemic.
Under legislation the government brought into force this month, the same model will be rolled out nationwide.
Thirty-six new LCSPs (five of them in Dublin city) will replace local authorities’ Joint Policing Committees (JPCs), longstanding fora where local politicians and community groups can consult with gardaí and make recommendations on local policing.
The clues to the differences between the two structures are in the names. By contrast with the Joint Policing Committees’ focus on the work of gardaí, the new LCSPs’ remit – community safety – is broader and the approach holistic, with An Garda Síochána only one of a number of state agencies around the table.
Even some of Helen McEntee’s colleagues in Fine Gael are not convinced.
Ray McAdam, a Fine Gael councillor for the north inner city, said: “My concern about the community safety partnership – why I don’t believe it is effective – is it lets the gardaí off the hook.”
“From my experience, I’m not convinced that the community safety partnership model will work. The reason I don’t think it works is that I don’t think there is the effective democratic accountability that the JPC structure had,” McAdam said.
Back in December 2023, in the aftermath of the riots, Horner wanted to collapse the LCSP and go back to the Department to demand fundamental changes to it – not least increased central government funding for safety initiatives in the north inner city. However, the LCSP decided to give itself more time to try and make the model work.
Horner believes the LCSP was used by the government after the riots as “a veneer for disguising the fact that nothing has been done”. Two years later, she does not believe much has changed, and she remains concerned that the LCSP is insufficiently resourced for the challenges it faces, and that its plan for the north inner city is ineffective.
“There’s no resources behind it, there’s no seniority, there’s no accountability,” Horner said.
“This is not an innovation that is going to improve the safety of the city. When you look at the challenges we’re facing, the safety plan is in the clouds, and there’s no relationship with the actual challenges on the ground.”
The Dublin safety plan, launched by McEntee in 2023, included initiatives such as drug outreach programmes to under-18s and the appointment of community safety wardens to patrol certain areas and increase the “feeling of safety”. The plan also tasked gardaí with having a continued strong presence in particular areas.
The plan was criticised by some local TDs for a perceived lack of ambition and for rehashing previously announced plans, as well as for tasking the council with activities – such as repairing lighting and tackling littering – that it should already be doing.
This changeover from JPCs to LCSPs is imminent. The Department of Justice is finalising detailed regulations on how the LCSPs should operate, but enabling legislation entered force this month and local authorities have already appointed chairpersons, and central government will fund full-time co-ordinators and administrators in each area.
Membership of the old JPCs has been dominated by politicians, and the chairpersons – councillors – were elected by the membership.
By contrast, the membership of the pilot LCSPs has been weighted towards community representatives and the Department of Justice chooses an independent chair from a shortlist of candidates compiled by the local authority.
The Policing Authority’s guidelines on JPCs emphasised accountability and, in practice, these meetings have often been used by politicians to hold the feet of senior gardaí to the fire.
For example, at a tense meeting of Dublin’s JPC in the aftermath of the Dublin riots, Garda commissioner Drew Harris was grilled on his force’s preparedness and response.
McAdam, the Dublin Fine Gael councillor, recalls that when he chaired the north central area JPC at the height of the Hutch-Kinahan gangland feud, it put in place an approach to visible community policing agreed by gardaí and public representatives, including members of the Oireachtas.
Asked about why the JPCs were being wound up, the Department of Justice said a key principle of the 2018 Commission on the Future of Policing in Ireland was that community safety requires “multi-agency cooperation working in partnership with An Garda Síochána and crucially with communities themselves”.
A Department of Justice policy paper on the LCSPs locates the new initiative as part of a move to a “whole of government” approach to community safety, with other services than just gardaí being brought to the table – education and youth work, health, drugs, housing, probation and so on. It’s partly based on Northern Ireland’s Policing and Community Safety Partnerships.
An evaluation of the three pilot LCSPs for the Department of Justice by the University of Limerick, published last year, concluded that the new model “fits well with the government’s vision” of making communities stronger and safer, and of “community safety as a whole of government responsibility” with a focus on community involvement.
The final evaluation report stated that the “majority of stakeholders” in the LCSPs were “positively disposed” towards the model.
(However, it’s worth noting that only a minority of LCSP members responded to the survey on which the evaluation was based – 34 out of 79 members, a response rate of just 43%).
Digging into the details, it becomes clear that the evaluation also threw up some less positive findings.
In particular, it indicated that Councillor Janet Horner’s concern that LCSPs are inadequately resourced is widely shared: only a minority of respondents across all three pilots agreed that their LCSP had enough funding to ensure it could do its work. Most members were not sure, or believed sufficient funding had not been put in place.
The Journal’s analysis of some of the data on which the evaluation was based, obtained under Freedom of Information, also points to uncertainty from LCSP members on one crucial point.
The official evaluation report did not include any discussion of two survey questions which got to the heart of the LCSPs’ stated purpose: to improve how safe the local community is, and to improve the sense of safety in the local community.
The evaluation report stated that these “key outcomes” were “likely to require sustained effort over a longer period before noticeable improvements are seen”.
In fact, across all three pilot areas, only a minority of respondents agreed that their LCSP had improved safety, or that it had improved their community’s sense of safety.
The most common response was that members simply didn’t know whether their LCSP had achieved either of these central aims, while a minority (sizeable in two pilot areas) believed it had not.
Comments made to the evaluation by LCSP members ranged from very positive to very negative.
“If this is supposed to be an example of community concerns being listened to, brought to the table, discussed and then dealt with in a meaningful way, it has failed,” stated one member, whose comment was not quoted in the evaluation report but was released under Freedom of Information.
“As I see it, the idea behind the concept is ‘community safety’. However, I am yet to see a genuine community problem being tabled as an agenda item or even discussed and teased out,” reads another LCSP member’s submission to the evaluation.
One participant said representatives from state agencies seemed to be working to “the agenda of their own organisations” which can be “at odds with that of residents”, while another said: “Not sure some agencies are as committed as others.”
In responses to the evaluation, members often raised the need for greater funding and resources – not only in terms of the LCSP itself, but within the budgets of its constituent agencies.
It’s a point that Horner raises too.
“If you get the HSE, the drug services, the youth services channelling some of their budget through the LCSP, I think they would get a lot more invested,” she says.
“But there is an element – and this is subjective and I’m sure they will say otherwise – that the state agencies and stakeholders are ticking a box by turning up to meetings, but not necessarily deeply invested in the outcomes.”
The Department of Justice has provided some funding – €7.9m in 2024 – to be funnelled through the LCSPs, specifically for use on local projects aimed at improving community safety.
In a statement to The Journal, the Department said every organisation involved in the Dublin LCSP has “committed” to implement its “detailed action plan”. It added that this included measures to tackle anti-social behaviour and drug dealing, to improve integration of new cultures into the area, and to increase awareness of issues such as domestic violence.
Dublin City Council said “the broad representation, in a partnership model, works together to support and achieve community safety”.
For Cormac Ó Donnchú, former chair of the Dublin LCSP, one of the greatest challenges faced by the initiative has been a shortage of political buy-in. He said this made it much harder to get the community to engage with the process. Ó Donnchú came to the LCSP from a background in business and in the voluntary sector (he is a former GAA club chairman and a former member of the board of Vincentian Refugee Centre).
“Certain parties never engaged with the LCSP,” Ó Donnchú recalls of his term, which ran from 2021 to 2023.
He added that it was also inherently difficult to find leaders from within the local community to engage with a process that involves party politicians.
“It was a challenge to motivate people to come in and try and convey a sense that their commitment and engagement could deliver positive results,” Ó Donnchú said.
Ó Donnchú said there was very strong commitment from city centre retailers group Dublin Town, from the council and from the HSE and gardaí during his time leading the LCSP.
He does not believe resourcing was the initiative’s primary problem.
“What we needed wasn’t to spend more money or have more resources. What we needed was greater cooperation and input from members of our community – including our public representatives,” he says.
Minutes of the Dublin meetings show that between February 2022 and the 2024 local elections, only three councillors – Janet Horner, Joe Costello of Labour and Independent Nial Ring – regularly attended the quarterly LCSP meetings.
The Sinn Féin and Fine Gael councillors for the north inner city – Janice Boylan and Ray McAdam – did not attend any of those LCSP meetings, the minutes indicate.
Boylan said she worked until 6pm so wasn’t free to attend and this was “the only reason” she hadn’t done so, adding that she has dropped in to chat with the LCSP staff. McAdam said he had told the chair that he could not attend due to family and other commitments, adding that he had attended some of the early meetings on the establishment of the LCSP.
Current and former community representatives of the Waterford LCSP pilot also raised concerns with The Journal that the new model meant less accountability for decisions made by garda management.
Michelle Byrne sat on the partnership for two years before resigning after feeling “fed up” about the direction it was taking.
A seasoned activist on housing and other issues in the region, she said that attempts to broaden the pilot’s work, including to tackle the potential reasons for certain types of crime, such as antisocial behaviour, vandalism of vacant properties and illegal dumping, did not come to fruition.
Proposals included more stringent enforcement of vacant property tax, or lobbying for councils to be allowed to resume waste collection services, Byrne said.
“I think a lot of people there were interested in looking at how do we support people to move away from crime, but the root cause of safety issues were being dismissed,” Byrne said, adding that she believes there was a “tokenistic” approach to community representation.
There were also tensions in Waterford over the appointment of one committee member, former Fianna Fáil councillor Eddie Mulligan, to the LCSP coordinator’s job.
This was questioned by members, with some expressing concerns at a meeting in September 2022 given Mulligan’s previous criticism of the LCSP when he was a politician.
Mulligan resigned as a councillor and from Fianna Fáil to take the salaried role as coordinator.
He had been an able committee member under the previous JPC model, including chairing it for a period, but he had regularly voiced concern over the new system, which decreased the number of councillors in favour of community representation.
Byrne said she shared concerns about having “one of the most critical voices” of the new model co-ordinating it.
Overall, former Dublin chair Ó Donnchú is positive about the LCSP and believes that the collaborative approach involved – very different to the adversarial political system – has real potential to improve community safety.
“The concept of getting everyone together is definitely the way forward and the way we need to be. We need to be realistic in the challenges we need to face, co-operatively – that’s the basis of the LCSP and absolutely it has great potential to deliver on that,” he said.
Current and former members of the LCSP in Co Longford say the pilot there has been a success, with strong local buy-in from across the community and from local state agencies.
Longford seems to have been more successful than Dublin in reaching out to and including ethnic minority communities.
Fianna Fáil councillor Seamus Butler, a former chair of Longford JPC and former vice-chair of the LCSP, agreed with the concerns raised by some Dublin councillors that the new structure does not provide the same accountability of gardaí to local representatives as the old JPC. He felt that the LCSP pilot should have happened in parallel to continuing the work of the JPC.
However, Butler said there is no question that the new LPSC had made a real difference in a particular estate in Longford where anti-social behaviour was a problem, with rubbish removed and plans in place to create a soccer facility on the green area.
Martina Moloney was Longford LCSP’s first chairperson. She attributes part of the initiative’s success in addressing safety concerns in some particular areas to the targeted collaboration of gardaí, the council and the local development company to all focus additional resources on these areas.
“I’m not saying it has resolved everything, and I’m not saying it’s not a continuing piece of work, but you have to start somewhere to build the trust,” Maloney said.
Maloney points to other initiatives of the Longford LCSP that made a difference and raised its profile locally, such as visiting agricultural shows to mark machinery to enable its recovery in the event of theft. The Longford pilot also put an emphasis on local consultation and outreach, including a public survey and public meetings.
On road safety, the Longford LCSP worked with gardaí to establish a novel “kids’ court”, whereby drivers caught speeding outside Stonepark National School were given a choice between penalty points or going into the school and answering the children’s questions on their behaviour.
“It was quite intimidating,” Maloney recalls. “The kids would ask fairly obvious questions, like ‘do you realise you could have knocked me down and killed me’? ‘You were doing 80 in a 50 [km/hr] zone?’ It was a very chastening experience for people.”
A public meeting at the end of the first year of the implementation of the LCSP’s safety plan was “packed”, including with members of ethnic minority communities, indicating local engagement with the initiative, Maloney said.
Maloney, a former county manager of both Galway and Louth County Councils, believes one advantage of LCSPs over JPCs is that the new fora are allocated a co-ordinator and an administrator, and this is one of the factors that makes the LCSPs “more likely to be able to deliver effective change”, along with the preparation of a local community safety plan.
“To drive change and implementation you have to have a human resource to do it,” Maloney said.
She argued that provision for annual public meetings at which anyone can ask questions, and the presence of elected representatives on the LCSPs, also ensures that public accountability is still a part of the work. She added that the Longford LCSP put an emphasis on making the plan “implementable”.
The Department of Justice said a newly established National Office for Community Safety will be responsible for monitoring the implementation of local community safety plans, and will help to set and oversee targets set by LCSPs.
Communities nationwide where safety is a concern will hope that the initiative can be effective.
With reporting by Eoghan Dalton.
The Journal’s reporting of the new Local Community Safety Partnerships is supported by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.
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