Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on this Bill. I welcome the Bill, which seeks to set policing on a 21st century footing. Some of the things enshrined in it are probably long overdue, but it is very important they are now there. It is vital for any organisation to have a clear set of purposes set out in law, in addition to good management structures, strong external oversight, and a code of ethics. It is particularly important in an organisation that still tends to recruit members at the age of 20. People continue in that organisation, with very little new blood coming in, until they are aged 60. That creates the risk of a very inward-looking organisation that thinks about promotion and progression in very internal ways. The element of the Bill that clearly states the purpose of policing is prevention and community safety, especially safety for vulnerable people, is very important. I like the new modern management structures that are being put in place, the code of ethics and so on.

I will focus my few remarks on the new approach to community safety partnerships, which is very important and welcome. In my experience, community policing has been honoured more in a nodding way rather than through a genuine commitment to transform the way communities interact with An Garda. There has been too much staff rotation. Internally, community policing has not been valued sufficiently. People who are in community policing are not seen as the people who are on the fast track to promotion. It is not valued in the same way as other parts of policing and has suffered as a consequence. In this Bill, we are seeing a major shift in the way the Oireachtas is thinking about the role of police as regards communities and other public bodies.

This Bill represents a major change management project. It will be difficult. In the first place, it will be difficult to get Garda buy-in. It will be extremely difficult to get prioritisation by other bodies, be they local authorities, the HSE, education and training boards, ETBs, or higher education institutions, in seeing their role as supporting effective, safe communities that are properly policed, with opportunities and an order that allow people to progress. It will struggle to get organisations that traditionally think about things in a way that almost takes forever, such as getting a public light or CCTV put in or fixing things that have been broken. There has to be a cultural change whereby those things are done quickly and swiftly to show that things have changed.

Anyone who has worked in the private sector will tell you three things are needed to deliver serious change management: a clear mandate, effective authority and a budget. No private organisation would consider delivering change management without entrusting the leader of such change management with all those things. We in the public service put far too much faith in a few statements, perhaps put into law or regulations, driving serious change in the way people think and act. The Bill deals quite well with the first element, namely, the mandate. It is clear what the Oireachtas wants. It is also clear it is imposing statutory obligations on the HSE, the ETB or the local authority to get involved in this. However, I do not see either the authority to drive change or the budget to drive the innovation that will be necessary if this is to happen.

A commitment to a high-level strategy document and a programme is coming from the steering group and the national office. That sort of approach is fine if we have a well-worked out programme, are talking about implementation, and have a fairly clear idea of the timelines and the delivery requirements. However, if we are talking about path-breaking change that will require people to step out of their silos and look in a new way at communities and their need to be safe, secure and progressive, we will need much more than that. There needs to be a commitment by the Government to give both the authority and budget to drive change. When I look at the steering group, I very much see a senior officials' group, or SOG, as it is called. I do not see a dynamic, pioneering group led by someone with a passion to change things and with the sort of authority to break down barriers. I do not see the members of that group coming from individual Departments as pioneers of change. I see them described as officials from X or Y. The way those sort of organisations will think is to continue to defend the mandate of the host Department, not the mandate of the new organisation that is being set up. I have seen time and again that people will come and defend their silos. They will give a limited amount of attention to the subject but their attention is elsewhere. We could quickly see this become more box-ticking than the pioneering driving of change we need.

We need to think afresh about this group. It should have a short-term mandate. It should not last ad infinitum.It should have a short period to get a system that will be different up and running. It needs to be absolutely certain it will get the status of community policing in An Garda elevated to one of the top things it does. Key performance indicators need to be built in from the outset to show this will be different. We need to see priority given to breaking cycles in areas where we need to break those cycles. That needs priority from organisations such as education bodies, a commitment to support innovation, and a substantial budget that will fund the innovation we need to see. The innovation could be in many different forms. We have seen many of the very successful initiatives, such as those in Darndale in my constituency, are things like sport, culture, festivals, youth outlets, diversion programmes and access programmes. These are quite different from the line management that could easily go into this steering group and will think of it in much narrower terms. That is why there has to be a substantial fund to allow communities to bubble up with their own ideas and be creative in the approach that is taken.

The proposed local structure is good, as is the idea of having a plan, having wide consultation in the community, setting key performance indicators, and requiring collaboration and co-ordination. That will not happen at local level, however, if there is no pioneering, innovating scope to draw down funds to do new things at national level. This will be as good as the creative energy we can harness within the community and public bodies. We will create a much better environment for that sort of creative thinking if there is money to fund the initiatives and if there are leaders of this regime who are willing to go down the road with unconventional initiatives. Certainly, any unconventional initiative has to have tests. It has to prove itself and be given a short period to do so, but we should be willing to innovate in communities.

The structure at local level will have to have an independent chair, chosen for his or her creativity and the confidence he or she has within the community. It must also have champions coming from the local organisations, not just officials. They have to be champions who want to see something different done, similar to the broken windows strategy that was famously applied in New York. It was about people doing their jobs in a different way. We need to make sure this initiative triggers that sort of creative thinking.

I thank the Chair for the opportunity to contribute. I commend the Minister on the Bill. This is a very worthwhile direction of travel but a little more thought has to be put in to make sure it realises its potential.

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