The CEO of the business group Dublin Town Richard Guiney has called for the return of measures that deter anti-social behaviour in the city centre.
Speaking on RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland, Mr Guiney said that post pandemic there seemed to be more aggressive behaviour amongst adolescents “who don’t know how to behave themselves”.
The “drug of choice” had changed from heroin to crack cocaine which meant drug users were “more on edge”, he added.
“We've been here before and we have addressed successfully before many of the issues that are arising. We need to look up what we were doing. And there are a couple of things that worked. The Small Areas Policing was very successful. That was where guards were assigned responsibility for particular parts of the city. That was a very good initiative.
“We had the best setting for where ourselves, the council, the guards, the drug services, the home services came together to coordinate what we were doing and examine the issues arising on a street by street basis, because the issues move around the city at various times and that was hugely successful.
“We do track the perceptions of safety in the city. And that was the one period where we got a significant improvement in the perception of safety. And people were feeling a lot more comfortable when they were in the city.
“We've been calling for the reestablishment of that process for about five or six years now. And I think it's high time that we do it. It's not only a policing issue. I think we also need to consider the very high levels of concentration of social services within the core city and particularly around the Talbot Street area.”
Mr Guiney said that best international practice reports indicated that over concentration of such services for vulnerable people facilitated drug dealing.
“We do need to bring back what we were doing that was successful. We've been advocating for doing the right thing for a number of years. And I'm very disappointed that some of the things that were working ceased to be implemented.
“We also have to be conscious that issues of violence and attacks are things that do happen across the world. There has been a deterioration in safety and perceptions of safety across the world, particularly with young people who post-pandemic seem to have lost how to behave themselves in an appropriate fashion.
“There certainly seems to be emerging evidence that people who came to adolescence during the pandemic didn't learn the processes of appropriate behaviour. And we also found, almost attention seeking behaviour, some bizarre things where young folks were going into offices and refusing to leave meeting rooms. It just struck us as kind of attention seeking. But there has been more aggressive behaviour. And the other issue is that the drug of choice has changed from heroin to crack cocaine, and that has given rise to more aggression.”
Irish Olympian Jack Wooley who experienced an assault in Dublin city centre in 2021 has called for greater garda presence to deter anti-social behaviour.
Mr Wooley told Newstalk Breakfast that on the night he was attacked there were no gardaí walking in the area and it was a passing garda car, which was flagged down by one of his friends, that came to his aid.
Part of the problem was that the young people who were committing these crimes did not care as they might be under the age of 18 and there was “a small chance of anything happening to them". It should be “set in the stone” that there would be repercussions for such actions, he urged.
