PLANS to roll out a Local Community Safety Partnership (LCSP) at Limerick City and County Council has been lambasted as a complete and utter dismissal of councillors in the Adare-Rathkeale Municipal District.
LCSPs, replacing the former Joint Policing Committees (JPCs), aim to prioritise the voice of local people in identifying and addressing community safety issues in collaboration with a broad range of stakeholders including local councillors, An Garda SÃochána, community representatives, business and education representatives, and a range of statutory agencies including the HSE, Tusla, and each local authority.
However, at this month’s meeting of the Adare-Rathkeale area, Council members were far from impressed at the idea of nominating only one councillor per district to sit on the LCSP.
Fine Gael councillor Adam Teskey, who was the chair of the last JPC in Limerick, took the view that he should be entitled to call JPC meetings whenever necessary, despite the fact they have been done away with as part of an overhaul of local community policing.
“You may not be aware of the issues that face Rathkeale town. The population triples at Christmas and we’ve had shootings, stabbings, robbings of cars, gross misconduct in relation to criminals, and we’ve had seizures in terms of weapons and violent disturbances,” Cllr Teskey told the Council’s local community safety coordinator, Paul Roney.
“Our district goes from Kilteery all the way into Ballyneety and Ballybricken. It stretches from Kildimo all the way out to Ballingarry and up as far as Lee’s Cross. So I request that we get a minimum of two members,” Cllr Teskey insisted.
Councillors were informed that the LCSPs are a different model to the JPCs, with a government approach. The whole partnership, Mr Roney explained, is about a preventable model.
Cllr Stephen Keary agreed with Cllr Teskey’s sentiments and considered the notion of replacing JPCs with LCSPs a “puppet show”.
“If I express my opinion and I want to get a response at national level, and it does not work for me, then it’s a total waste of time, a waste of people’s time and effort, it’s only a puppet show,” he concluded.
In preparation for the national rollout, this partnership approach was successfully demonstrated in a pilot initiative which has been underway in Waterford, Longford, and Dublin North Inner City since 2021. The locations allowed the proposed structure to be trialled in a high population density area, a medium population density area and a low population density area, with a regional distribution.
