The year-long gap in community-safety work in Fingal

For years, Gardaí met with local councillors via Fingal’s joint policing committee (JPC), to discuss community safety challenges in the county.

Like at a December 2023 meeting, when Gardaí presented recent crime local statistics, significant arrests, and information about ongoing operations and community engagement. 

Local representatives asked Gardaí how policing of the previous Halloween had gone and what lessons they’d learnt, as well as what they were doing about issues including traffic enforcement, scramblers and quad bikes. 

After the Department of Justice announced that it was going to replace these committees nationwide with new “local community safety partnerships” (LCSPs), the Fingal JPC was stood down – last June. 

The plan was to replace it with two LCSPs – Fingal North and Fingal West. But nearly a year later, those have yet to start up, leaving a year-long void in community safety work in the county.

“It was an absolute shambles to stop one set before the next set were properly in play, a real shambles,” said Fingal’s mayor, Labour Councillor Brian McDonagh, by phone on 22 April. 

“It's like stopping the bus service before you’ve got a train between two areas,” he said.

The government needs to issue new regulations before the LCSPs can start work, said a council spokesperson, and a Department of Justice spokesperson.

What’s the hold-up?

At first, the plan was to choose voluntary chairs “to develop and manage” these new local community safety partnerships by having local authorities put out calls for expressions of interest.

Indeed, last June, Fingal put out a call for expressions of interest from people who might want to chair its two new LCSPs.

“As part of an Expression of Interest (EOI) process conducted by each Local Authority, the next step required the Minister for Justice formally appoint the Chairperson for each LCSP,” according to the Department of Justice.

Last October, then Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, the Fine Gael TD, announced the appointment of chairs for the first seven LCSPs being established across the country: Kildare, Leitrim, Louth, South Dublin, Sligo, Tipperary and Longford. 

However, it was later decided that this was not an acceptable selection process for selecting the chairs of the LCSPs – and that, instead, the chair of each LCSPs should be elected by its members. 

So, the initial appointments announced by the Minister for Justice were rescinded, says McDonagh, the mayor of Fingal. 

Since then, they’ve been waiting for the Department of Justice to send new regulations, without which they cannot proceed any further, he says. 

The new(ish) Minister for Justice, Jim O’Callaghan of Fianna Fáil said in the Dáil on 25 March, in a written response to the independent TD Barry Heneghan, that he was still working on that.  

“In accordance with the Policing, Security and Community Safety Act 2024, I intend to make regulations providing, inter alia, for the election of chairs and vice chairs of the Local Community Safety Partnerships, once the Act has been commenced,” O’Callaghan said. He announced he was commencing the law on 2 April. 

However, the regulations still aren’t out. 

“That was the start of the month and now we’re at the end of the month, and there still seems to be no sign of movement,” Labour Councillor James Humphries said by phone on Tuesday.

Department of Justice officials are “working with the Office of Parliamentary Counsel to finalise these regulations which it is intended to commence shortly”, a department spokesperson said by email on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Fingal’s waiting. “We’re awaiting the necessary regulations from the Department of Justice in order to establish the Partnerships,” a council spokesperson said by email Tuesday. 

“Once the Regulations have been issued the Council will proceed with the procedure for appointments to the two LCSP's for Fingal. Chairpersons will be elected by the Partnership members,” they said.

When Dublin City Council officials and councillors realised there would be a delay in the setting up of LCSPs, they restarted the JPCs in the interim.

Fingal County Council did not. The council has not responded to a query sent on Wednesday as to why it did not also keep the JPC in place for the time being.

What has been lost

Ian Carey, a former Green Party councillor, who chaired the last Fingal JPC, says that while the meetings allowed you to express concerns to gardaí, it was never a case of directing gardaí to tackle particular issues.

“You didn’t get to go into asking, ‘What are we doing about this problem or that problem?’ It wasn’t that kind of forum,” he said by phone on 22 April.

McDonagh, the current Fingal mayor, says the JPC was a channel for communities and local representatives to highlight issues with An Garda Síochana and push for them to be addressed by community gardaí. 

“We don’t have a forum to do that officially and properly at the moment,” he said.

Humphries, the Labour Party councillor, says the JPC was a way of getting factual information from Gardaí very quickly, “especially after something happened in the area and there was false information going out about it”.  

Dean Mulligan, the Independents 4 Change councillor, who sat on the Fingal JPC from 2019 to 2024, says that while there were some strengths to that system, there were weaknesses too. 

Mulligan said he found it more useful to call and speak to gardaí directly, rather than receiving reports from Garda superintendents at the committee meetings.

“The senior gardaí are reading the data off a sheet that's been populated for them,” he said by phone on Wednesday. “You're not getting to the bones of it, because they're not there on the ground.” 

The JPC was a “talking shop” based on data that “didn't have substance”, he says. 

Over the past year, since the JPC was stood down, local gardaí have remained open and forthcoming when asked for particular information, Mulligan said.

“I've put in individual queries in regards of instances of crime causing harm, domestic violence, and the statistics that we've looked for that we'd normally get in the JPC, the guards have been good at issuing them to us,” he said.

Are LCSPs a step forward or back?

The Department of Justice piloted the new approach, the local community safety partnership, by setting one up a few years ago in Dublin’s north inner-city.

The idea is to try 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.

After the pilot, despite concerns raised in March 2024 by councillors involved in the north inner-city LCSP, the department announced that it was rolling out that model nationwide.

Councillors raised concerns about the effectiveness of the LCSP. And Labour Councillor Dermot Lacey said the partnerships diminished the role of councillors compared to the existing structures – the JPCs – because not all local representatives will be invited to them.

Lacey, a long-time advocate for strengthening local government, remains concerned about the elimination of the JPCs in favour of the LCSPs, he said Saturday. 

The abolition of the JPCs follows a “pattern of central government increasing centralisation and reducing the power to local government”, said Lacey. He said he felt the JPCs worked “quite effectively”.

Lacey said he’s sceptical that reducing the number of councillors on the new committees and instead adding representatives from government bodies will actually help improve community safety. 

“If you had HSE and TUSLA and bodies like that on the new community safety fora, as equal partners, they’re not answerable,” he said.

“The Oireachtas health committee doesn't have the HSE sitting on as equal partners. The Oireachtas health committee questions the HSE and questions what role of the HSE is, and what the HSE do,” he says. 

There will be fewer councilors to question the Gardaí, the HSE, Tusla, and other bodies – and more representatives of statutory bodies sitting on the committee, who are unlikely to criticise each other. 

“One statutory body won't criticise another statutory body,” he says. “To a certain extent, they'll come together and defend each other against public representatives.”

Mulligan, the Independents 4 Change councillor in Fingal, says he has not “put his name in the hat” for a place on a new LCSP in his area. 

He’s not optimistic that the new system will bring meaningful change, he says.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.