Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The Social Democrats will support the motion and commend the Sinn Féin Deputy for bringing it to the floor. It is an eminently sensible motion and does not lend itself to a grandiose speech.

Most of us who live and operate within the city are brought to our senses several dozen times a day with the reverberations of fireworks and all that that entails. We can feel lucky we are not those with sensory issues who have been really impacted by them. As has been said several times, while fireworks have always been a feature of life in cities, this year they have appeared earlier and they are louder and more prevalent. That suggests there is an underlying problem.

I would like to touch on some of the positive initiatives I know of that could be used to counter this but that have been eroded over the past couple of years. I refer to policing in the north inner city and across Dublin as a whole. Democracy is a forum and works best when State agencies, community leaders and the community that is impacted sit around a table to have discussions and look for solutions. That has worked very well at times in Dublin, through the community policing initiatives and meetings that happened over the past couple of years. They were running out of steam because things were getting more angry before now. Covid is being used as an excuse not to have such meetings.

Community policing meetings came to a complete stop during the Covid pandemic. There has been no attempt to use innovation or hold Zoom meetings. In the south inner city, for example, the latest community policing meeting was held in October 2019. In my constituency, Dublin Central, the community policing forum was one of the first of its kind in Europe and had good intentions at the start. I was critical of how it developed, but its original intent was fantastic in the sense that it had an office in the heart of a constituency, which had an often troubled relationship with the gardaí. It was designed so that community leaders could be an interface between a community that was distrustful of the gardaí and the gardaí themselves. It worked very well for a time. Last year, for no apparent reason, it was defunded. It closed up shop and was not replaced.

The meetings that were held in schools around the area where communities could get together with gardaí and thrash out problems simply stopped. The pandemic exists, but if community leaders were organising Zoom meetings in residential areas to get together with the community gardaí, some of these issues would be dealt with. It was never the case that young people attended the meetings, but community leaders, such as leaders of local boxing clubs, youth clubs and those who organised pool sessions and talked to young people, would attend.

People would be able to rely the fact that when some people had a bit of craic and let off a banger that affected children with autism or sensory issues or increased anxiety in a woman whose dogs were going berserk, they could be spoken to. We no longer have such meetings. We need to demonstrate a little leadership in getting those structures back because they have been lost.

There has also been a breakdown in the relationship between the gardaí in my constituency and, I am sure, the rest of Dublin. We had community policing, which was about engaging with young people. When that was at its best, gardaí knew the names of Johnny or whomever and could have a conversation with him or her. As we have eroded community policing to the detriment of those relationships, those relationships are gone. Fireworks are now going off and nobody knows the names of the young people who are doing it. That is a recent departure because there was a time where if young people were at risk of getting into trouble and were engaging in some sort of deviant behaviour, there was always somebody who knew their names and could call and have a chat with them.

We all canvassed in the past six months and one of the things candidates heard from older people was that they no longer saw local gardaí around. That is great shame in the sense that it increases anxiety among the older population and makes them feel less safe.

There was a fantastic initiative, with an unfortunate acronym, in the north inner city called the small area policing initiative, which operated for a couple of years under a former Garda Commissioner. It involved gardaí knocking on every single door and having a chat with residents, most of whom were older people. That initiative is gone. A modern police force is in a sad state when it cannot engage constructively with our constituents in a manner that we know works and has positive outcomes.

With regard to those who let off bangers, I always ask who is benefiting from this noise and the infiltration of fireworks into our communities. I promise that for every banger going off or rocket taking off, somebody is making a profit. I do not believe there has been any moralising in the Chamber tonight. I would not suggest there has been and previous speakers have been considerate in not doing that. However, I have heard moralising in some of the conversations about this issue in the radio. What we are not hearing about are the gangs that are clearly benefiting and making exorbitant amounts of money by smuggling in these fireworks. I know Operation Tombola is taking place in communities and on the streets but is it effective and is it able to take the head off the snake? I am not convinced that is the case.

On an issue that has been raised several times in this debate, in the absence of the structures that have been put in place for Hallowe'en in communities across Dublin in recent years, Hallowe’en night this year will be like no other before it. I am talking about people who organised parades and fancy dress and worked with kids in youth clubs for months in advance of Hallowe'en and helped them make up their costumes and build little warehouses that could be turned into fun factories. If all of that stops, we will go back to the scenes we witnessed four or five years ago when communities were effectively under siege and there were running battles on the streets. That was always a genuine fear on Hallowe’en night but, through extraordinary community leadership, we were able to combat it. That is under threat this year. Since July, we have seen a build-up, which will reach a crescendo if we do not take ownership of the problem now. That must start in the Department and work its way down through all Deputies. It must allow us to engage with the local authorities which are the funding mechanism for these initiatives. We must try to ensure we can be positive, rather than waking up at the start of November realising that we have missed an opportunity and the community has suffered as a consequence. We still have time to solve this and I hope we can act up that.

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