Another plan to turn around the fortunes of Dublin’s north inner city has been published by the Government. One would of course have to wish it every success, while not having the highest of hopes.
There has been a succession of plans for the inner city over the decades, particularly from the early 1980s with the advent of the drugs crisis and in more recent decades with the rise in gangland crime. However, nothing has yet managed to lift the majority of the population out of poverty, bring educational attainment levels to the national average, or cut violent incidents and the impression the area is unsafe.
The Dublin North Inner City Local Community Safety Plan (LCSP), published on Friday by Minister for Justice Helen McEntee, lists 50 “actions” across five priority areas: “drugs, inclusion-health and antisocial behaviour”; “family, youth and community”; “education and life-long learning”; “integration, ethnic and multi-faith inclusion”; and “physical environment”. The report follows a spate of violent assaults in the city, most recently on Thursday night.
In its ambitions and strategies it appears very similar to the North East Inner City Task Force which arose out of a 2017 report by industrial relations expert Kieran Mulvey. His report, Creating a Brighter Future, which followed a series of gangland shootings in the area, focused on tackling crime and drugs, developing education, training and employment opportunities, improving social services, and physical infrastructure.
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The new plan does acknowledge a debt to the Mulvey report, although it misnames it slightly as Creating a Better Future. The safety plan will benefit from “close alignment” with the task force, which it says offers a “model of best practice and the LCSP supports its replication where appropriate”. It asserts its own USPs however, including an “additional framework for on-street engagement with those in active addiction”.
Part of this response will be the use of community safety wardens, which did not feature in the Mulvey strategy, and would “provide an increasing feeling of safety and act as an additional opportunity to observe and report issues of concern for antisocial behaviour”, as well as directing those in addiction to services.
However, on Friday there appeared a lack of clarity over their precise role. Speaking on Newstalk’s Pat Kenny Show, Garda Representative Association president Brendan O’Connor said he would be “very cautious of the notion of community safety wardens. We don’t know what they are,” but was concerned they would be used as a “cheap alternative to proper policing”.
Fine Gael Senator Barry Ward was on hand to explain the wardens would not be a substitute for gardaí, but would be people from the community who would be “available as an extra set of eyes and ears for the guards” to assist gardaí and “to feed information into the guards, to be conduit for information and to be a liaison with the guards”.
Anxious to dispel any notion of curtain twitching, Richard Guiney, chief executive of business organisation DublinTown, which will be the employer of the wardens, stepped in to say the wardens would be “on the street engaging with people”, providing support for tourists and directing people in addiction or homelessness towards the appropriate services.
The report does have target dates for its 50 recommendations, and it would be unfair to write it off based on this initial mixed messaging, but given the gravity of the task in hand, it was not an auspicious start.