Representatives of Dublin’s city-centre businesses would appear to have come to the belated realisation that banging on about people not feeling safe in Dublin is not only wrong but also counterproductive.
The recent stabbing attacks in Stoneybatter and the fatal stabbing of Quham Babatunde at the weekend has not generated anything like the sort of frenzy usually associated with incidents of violent crime in the city.
Maybe we are just lucky that the new Dáil is still finding its feet but for some reason the calls for thousands of extra gardaí to patrol the crime-infested streets of the capital have not started up... yet.
If anything, both politicians and the representatives of city-centre business seem to be backing away from the notion of boots on the ground as the panacea for the problem they have largely manufactured: that Dublin isn’t safe.
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Richard Guiney, the head of We are Dublin Town, which represents 2,500 businesses in the city centre and has been a vocal proponent of flooding the city centre with uniformed gardaí, seemed to soften his line this weekend.
“I think we have to be realistic; we’re not going to have gardaí on every street corner 24 hours a day,” he told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland.
“We’re not going to police ourselves out of the problems that we have in the city,” he added.
He also seemed to downplay the value of the 1,000 extra gardaí he has been seeking. They would be very welcome, he said, because “there is a civic reassurance when people see gardaí on the street”.
The new Minister for Justice, Jim O’Callaghan, also seemed to be trying to ‘change the narrative’, telling the station’s This Week programme that he had sought an update from Garda Commissioner Drew Harris about the level of Garda presence in the area where Babatunde was attacked.
But O’Callaghan then went on to question whether it was reasonable to expect a Garda presence in the area at that time of the morning, before making the point that “no matter what level of Garda presence we have, let’s identify where responsibility for this rests. It rests on the outrageous, reckless individuals and criminal people who got involved in that type of public behaviour.”
Barry Ward, the recently elected Fine Gael TD for Dún Laoghaire, similarly belled the cat on Claire Byrne later on Monday morning: “If you look at the statistics, Ireland is one of the safest countries ... Let’s not get carried away with the presentation of Dublin somehow is a kind of a new Gotham City. It’s not.”
Drew Harris will no doubt be pleased to see some realism entering the debate in respect of the need for more gardaí in Dublin city centre. With recruitment to the force growing slowly after four years of decline he would have had trouble finding them, let alone justifying their deployment to meet the rather nebulous objective of making people feel safer in Dublin city centre. This may have had something to do with the apparent outbreak of common sense among politicians and business representatives.
The problem that now faces those representing city-centre business is that, having promulgated the damaging narrative that people don’t feel safe in Dublin, how to do they walk it back in the absence of their proposed solution of flooding the city with gardaí?
The first thing to do is stop talking the city centre down. It is hard to understand how Guiney thought he was going to encourage anyone to do their Christmas shopping in Dublin last year by saying in the run-up to the peak shopping period that more gardaí were needed on the streets because people were concerned over their safety.
But the most effective thing they can do is what they did this weekend: not feeding the moral panic that takes over after a violent incident in the city centre. Maynooth University criminologists Kevin Wozniak and Ian Marder describe this as “a frantic sense that ‘something must be done’ follows an incident being honed in on, amplified and generalised into representing a wider social issue”.
It almost inevitably leads to a “frenzy among commentators, politicians and social media users, often laced with classist and racist undertones and accompanied by calls for harsher policing, ‘zero-tolerance crackdowns’ and, ultimately, the greater use of imprisonment.”
Sounds familiar? Such is the power of this particular moral frenzy which began with the November 2023 riots that the programme for government contains a commitment to “transforming Dublin city centre into a vibrant, safe and attractive destination for living, working, business and tourism”. Most of the people who live and work there would probably argue it already is one.
Combating the perception that Dublin city centre is some sort of lawless wasteland rather than simply leaning into it should be the touchstone of whatever initiative actually emerges out of the Department of the Taoiseach on foot of this commitment.
