Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I take that on board and understand it. The Minister is correct that there are not task forces in every area. It will be very specific. It is not always drugs and alcohol. It often has a much wider remit than only responding to drug and alcohol use because these exist within community infrastructure in general relating to many other issues within the community. Drug-related intimidation is spoken about so much. What if we do not name these task forces in the guidelines as bodies from which representatives can be drawn? In some communities, someone may have to be pulled from the family resource centre if they do not have a task force or whatever it may be. Within task forces, specifically in Dublin and in some of the more regional task forces, there is an institutional knowledge that exists such that if we were not to write them in from the offset, because they have been working on community safety for so long, we could do ourselves a disservice because we are not capturing that community-based knowledge. Many communities feel that way, and community safety groups or other forms of groups are put in and are very structural and very authoritarian. They are the authority. They are the institutions. We should ensure that community organisations, whether task forces, community development organisations or family resource centres, are somehow mentioned specifically within the guidelines because that is the gap between the people we say we want to keep safe at a community level in order that it does not seem like a top-down approach. We have to write into the guidelines the bottom-up approach with the same strength and vigour we write in the bottom-down approach as regards local authorities or Tusla. We can imagine the relationship many communities have with some of those bodies. From the outset, it is creating a gap that can be bridged very easily by explicitly acknowledging within the guidelines or the legislation the roles that those other community representatives and organisations, including voluntary organisations, play within communities. To have them written in with the same parity with which we are writing in the statutory organisations would give it more power and more credence with local communities.