Mary Fitzpatrick (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Before I was appointed to the Seanad I was a city councillor. I was chair of a joint policing committee in Dublin Central and a founding director of the Cabra Community Policing Forum. I understand the importance of having good structures in place to deal with issues that arise in our communities around policing. I know the Minister shares the ambition we all have for safer communities. I believe safer communities can be delivered where there are proper structures in place that are properly resourced and that are engaged with, not just the statutory organisations but the community as well, and that have buy-in from the community. That is where they are always successful.

I thank the Minister for the engagement she has had with the Fianna Fáil group on this legislation generally but specifically on the issue around the community safety partnerships and the membership of them. As a former city councillor, I found the joint policing committees to be one of the most effective forums where there are the statutory agencies meeting on a quarterly basis in a public forum but in a structured way and there are the elected representatives. It is not just the city and county councillors but also those Members of the Oireachtas who took an interest. Not all of them did for various reasons. That is their business but there was a real opportunity to both review what was going on in our area and to examine the root causes and agree specific actions that could be taken by either statutory agencies on their own or in partnership with the community.

The councillors have a real role to play in it because oftentimes when we talk about our communities being safer, we talk about the public domain. We talk about our parks, streets and roads. Councillors have a direct impact there as because they get to set the annual budget for the local authority, they get to determine where the funds are prioritised. They can, at a local level, direct resources to support the statutory agencies and to support the Garda to make our communities safer. The requirement, from our perspective, was to ensure the councillors' role is continued in the community safety partnerships and that Oireachtas Members also can participate in the community safety partnerships. I believe that the chair is a really important role and that the local authority members are best positioned to fill that role.Earlier, the Minister mentioned that there can be variations from one jurisdiction to another, and from one local authority area to another. The community safety partnership itself should determine who is the best positioned to act as chair. Most importantly, community safety partnerships need to be accountable to the community. The way to do that is by having community membership and holding meetings in public on a regular basis of four times a year.

I genuinely appreciate the Minister for engaging with us. I understand that she will bring forward regulations. The best place to do this is in regulations because that allows for regulations to be amended in the future, if and when circumstances change. When the Minister responds, I would appreciate it if she spoke about, thereby helping the Seanad to understand, the timeline around which the regulations will be brought forward because there is significant interest in the timeline.

Finally, Cabra Community Policing Forum might be the only remaining community policing forum in this country. I would appreciate if the Minister talked about a timeline for how the forum will operate within an expanded community safety partnership.

Senator Shane Cassells:I welcome the constructive discussion here this afternoon. The one thing that has been pressed by all people as pertaining to this section is to ensure the best outcome for communities. Senator Boyhan said that he wrote to all the councillors who were members of joint policing committees and talked about their positive engagement with this Bill. The Oireachtas Members play a very important role on JPCs as well. I always make sure that I attend the meetings of the policing committees in County Meath. It is great that we have the Minister for Justice, as a representative of a Meath constituency, who is herself a regular attendee at our meetings. Indeed, she engaged outside of those meetings with the business community and An Garda Síochána when issues pertaining to crime and antisocial behaviour were prominent last year in our major towns. I cannot say that for all of the Oireachtas Members in County Meath. Quite a few of them go on about crime ad nauseam. They stick pictures of themselves on lampposts about crime but, by God, when they have the opportunity to meet the chief superintendent or the Minister for Justice, they are absent and missing. You would nearly have to ring the guards who work in the missing persons section to find them.