Did the €10m boost for policing to combat Dublin city centre violence work?

When Dublin business leaders met Assistant Garda Commissioner Angela Willis on Thursday afternoon there was, unsurprisingly, one issue that dominated.

As reported by The Irish Times earlier, a Government plan to surge policing in the capital and shore up perceptions of public safety has exhausted its budget and is not being renewed.

In their meeting with Willis, who oversees policing in Dublin, business owners demanded to know what impact this would have on rates of theft, public order incidents and assaults in the city.

There was little to be worried about, the senior garda assured them. There will be sufficient policing numbers to make people feel safe throughout the year and Operation Citizen, an initiative launched in 2021 to increase public safety, will continue.

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Some business owners were less than convinced. “The feeling I got from what she said was there is going to be a negative fallout,” said one afterwards.

The €10 million surge funding dedicated to Garda overtime was announced by Minister for Justice Helen McEntee last July following a series of violent attacks in Dublin which shocked the country.

In one incident, US tourist Stephen Termini was left in a coma following a vicious attack by a group of youths on Talbot Street. This came a few weeks after Ukrainian actor Oleksandr Hrekov was slashed across the face on Eden Quay.

The extra money was to be used exclusively for Garda overtime in Dublin, the Minister told Garda Commissioner Drew Harris.

Figures suggest the underlying problem was one of perception rather than reality. In the first half of 2023, rates of assaults and public order offences – the type of offending that tends to impact public feelings of safety – were almost identical to the same period the year before.

A new Garda station on O’Connell Street, which remained open until 2am, had “very, very little, if any, callers” after 10pm daily, a senior officer observed at the time.

But perception matters. In the aftermath of the Termini assault, foreign embassies began issuing warnings to their citizens about safety in the capital and businesses noticed a significant impact on trade.

“The best thing for public feelings of safety is the sight of yellow jackets on the street,” said one businessman who was at Thursday’s meeting.

The ending of the Garda overtime surge is particularly frustrating for those living and working in the city centre because it was actually having a visible impact.

[ ‘The place has turned into a right kip’: Temple Bar business owners complain of surge in drug abuse and crime ]

The fund paid for 20,000 extra garda shifts over a five-month period. This translated to roughly six extra shifts for each uniformed garda in the Dublin Metropolitan Region and significantly more when non-frontline members are excluded.

The decision to deploy a class of recruits from the Garda College in Templemore on to the streets of Dublin a month early also helped to increase police visibility.

“It didn’t necessarily have an impact immediately after the attack [on Termini] in July. But after the riots on November 22nd, you could really see it,” said Daithí Doolan, a Sinn Féin councillor who sits on the Dublin City Joint Policing Committee.

The city was able to bounce back surprisingly quickly after the riots which caused millions of euro in damage and saw various stores and public transport vehicles ransacked or torched.

It was the worst violence seen in the capital in decades and it seemed certain to scare off visitors to the capital over the Christmas period. But, thanks in part to the extremely visible Garda presence in the days and weeks after, this did not happen.

“Footfall was actually up on December 2022″, said Richard Guiney, chief executive of the business representative group Dublin Town. “We didn’t think that was going to happen. The Garda presence was definitely an important element of why it did.”

Now the overtime spigot has been turned off and the class of Garda recruits are back in Templemore finishing their training. A programme to bring extra gardaí in from other regions to boost numbers in the capital has also come to an end.

It is too early to say what, if any, impact this is having. McEntee told RTÉ's News at One on Thursday that the commissioner has assured her “gardaí will continue to police Dublin heavily”.

[ Dublin city centre street closed down due to drugs and crime ]

This was echoed by Garda Headquarters in a statement on Thursday: “An Garda Síochána will continue to deploy gardaí on high-visibility patrols not just in Dublin city centre but across the wider Dublin region and the other divisions generally as required.”

Members of the public order unit will continue to be deployed on the city’s streets on a daily basis, a spokeswoman said.

The efficacy of this policing plan will soon be tested. St Patrick’s Day, the unofficial start of the capital’s tourist season, is just two months away.

In the meantime, gardaí have to handle a uptick in gangland violence, a series of planned anti-immigration protests with the potential for violence and a continuing spate of arson attacks on asylum seeker accommodation in the capital and elsewhere.

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