Seized proceeds of crime should go back into areas scarred by crime, councillors and TD say

The government’s Community Safety Fund has been a “Godsend”, says Kevin Dolan, manager of Ballyfermot Youth Services (BYS).

The annual fund directs the proceeds of crime, gathered by the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) and An Garda Síochána, back to local projects supporting community safety.

For this year, BYS got €150,ooo, allowing them to pay for two full-time staff to work in their Adventure Centre, where young people enjoy activities like mountain biking and kayaking.

They have also hired a psychotherapist for 21 hours a week. “She’s been amazing. An essential part of our service going forward,” says Dolan.

While many organisations around Ireland have reaped benefits from the Community Safety Fund since it launched in 2021, there are voices calling for changes in where the money goes.  

Monies raised by CAB through seizing the proceeds of crime should be directly targeted back into the areas that are most affected by those criminals, says Gary Gannon, Social Democrats TD for Dublin Central.

It’s an issue that has been coming up at Dublin City Council meetings, too.

In May, Sinn Féin Councillor Seamas McGrattan, chair of the council’s finance committee, wrote to the Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan about the fund. 

Committee members would like a breakdown of the money collected by CAB – where it was collected and where it was disbursed.

“There was an understanding at the meeting that the monies were allocated back to the local communities. Please confirm if this is the case and provide detail if possible,” he said.

The response didn’t provide much detail, though.

Back to the community it came from

Gannon, the Social Democrats TD, suggests using the Pobal Deprivation Index to determine which areas are most negatively impacted by gangland crime. 

These are the areas and communities most deserving of reaping the benefits from the seized monies, he says. 

Drug-related intimidation, for example, is an issue that’s faced predominantly in the communities in which these crimes are happening, says Gannon.

So, such areas should have funding for drug-related intimidation officers, he said by phone on Wednesday.

At the moment, the proceeds of crime, seized by CAB, go into a central pot. Everyone across the country can apply for the funding, he says.

But that needs to change, says Gannon. “I think it should absolutely be targeted at the communities that are most at the front line of combatting crime.”

Confronting crime is not just a policing issue, Gannon says.

It requires youth-work intervention, and therapeutic supports, he says, all of which need resourcing.

Labour Councillor Dermot Lacey has also been pushing for reform to the Community Safety Fund.

He has no problem, he says, with even 80 percent of funds derived from criminality going into a central pot.

But there should be a principle of redirecting monies when there’s a cost to a specific community, he said by phone on Tuesday. 

He is consistent in that, he says. A community seeing development should benefit from development levies, he says, while those hurt by crimes should get some recompense through the CAB funds.

It points to a wider governance problem, Lacey says – political decision making in Ireland has become more centralised.

“Once upon a time, councillors would have decided all the rules about, say, sports grants,” he says. But now that’s all decided at the national level, he says.

“There's been a sort of a centralising and centralising and centralising of powers and responsibility. That’s what the civil service wants,” he says.

On the ground

McGrattan got a reply in July from Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan’s private secretary, to his request for a breakdown of the proceeds seized and passed on by CAB.

Figures for 2024 and to date in 2025 weren’t available, the letter said. They would be once annual reports were out.

That means it is uncertain if the €3.75 million allocated to the Community Safety Fund in 2024 was less, or more, than the amount passed on last year.

In 2023, €2.2 million from the proceeds of crime was passed on by CAB, shows its annual report. While €2.9 million was paid out through the fund pot. 

In 2022, meanwhile, about €2 million was returned to the exchequer, and €1.6 million was paid out through the fund.

In any case, there should be more funding invested into youth services and early intervention, says Amy Carey, CEO of the Solas Project, in the Liberties.

Now, community-safety projects are more reactionary, coming in at a later stage, she says.

Much more funding is going into youth justice work than early interventions and mainstream youth work, she says.

Carey too would like to see funds from CAB being used in the communities where the impacts of gang crime are most acutely felt.

There should also be a longer strategy at play, rather than bits and pieces of funding dropped in, she says.

“It needs to be built into ongoing, sustainable funding for youth services.”

This is the one big drawback, says Kevin Dolan of BYS.

The new staff members that the Community Safety Fund has allowed Ballyfermot Youth Service to hire have been game changers, he says.

But BYS doesn’t know if it’ll have the same funding next year to keep them on, he says.

A Department of Justice submission to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice last year relayed, among the application criteria, that projects should be one-off or short- to medium-term, and salaries should be for temporary positions.

Dolan says that it’s harder to make long-term plans that can make a real, positive impact in an area when you are working year to year.

The application process is hefty too, considering it’s a once-off funding, says Carey.

This application process can make it restrictive to small grassroots organisations who are “time poor”, says Gannon.

“If you're a project in the north inner-city, you're going to be spending a lot of your time dealing with the emotional needs of young people,” he says.

Those teams often won’t have the time to spend days filling out forms, he says.

The Inner City Organisations Network (ICON) has also availed of the community safety fund, says Belinda Nugent, ICON’s community development project leader.

They used it for an animated short film which itself demonstrates why the CAB funds should be targeted more directly into the areas that they were drawn from, she says.

The Runners centres on the trafficking of children by inner-city drug gangs into criminality.

It breaks Nugent’s heart, she says, to see kids as young as 10 being used as drug runners. But she sadly sees it all the time, she says.

“Then six years later, you see them as this tough lad, and you're like, that kid had no chance,” she says.

The Department of Justice hasn’t responded to queries about the idea of  reforming the Community Safety Fund, to direct monies seized by CAB towards specific communities.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.