The Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration is seeking feedback on its draft National Strategy for Improving Community Safety until 5PM on September 11 2026.
The survey is open to anyone in Ireland, and can be answered digitally or via post.
The National Strategy for Improving Community Safety 2026-2030 is described as an “enabling framework” for creating “safe and resilient” communities in Ireland.
The draft strategy takes the view that community safety “is not solely the responsibility of An Garda Síochána” but a “collective responsibility” requiring cooperation between different agencies and “partnership with communities”.
It says that community safety is “increasingly understood through a holistic framework encompassing crime prevention, health, wellbeing, environment, and social inclusion” and that achieving it requires a “whole of government, whole of society” approach.
According to the document, it encompasses not just objective safety metrics, such as exposure to crime, anti-social behaviour and risk of harm, but “subjective experiences” also.
Examples of the latter offered in the strategy include a sense of safety, confidence, belonging and trust within a community.
Despite the broad conception of community safety, it states that for many of those who participated in previous consultation stages “high visibility policing and enforcement” stood out as important aspects of community safety, particularly in relation to “public reassurance, responsiveness, and addressing crime and anti-social behaviour”.
Understood as having a positive impact on community safety was a “strong connection” between local gardaí and the community they’re assigned to.
However, it says that participants also believed community safety is shaped by social conditions including poverty, exclusion, inequality, mental health and level of trust in public institutions, among others.
The five “principles” set out in the draft strategy are prevention and early intervention; collaboration and trust; place based and context specific; community embedded decision making; and an “integrated approach” to policy.
Alongside these principles, it lists “enablers” of community safety, among which are “safe and inclusive” spaces; tailored responses for communities; “well-functioning” public services; and “evidence informed decision making”.
Under the section discussing evidence informed decision making, a “robust, data driven framework” is called for in order to achieve a preventative approach to community safety, rather than one that is simply reactive to crime.
This recommendation comes as public calls for greater transparency concerning crime and ethnicity data grow, with a recently-launched campaign making the issue one of its central demands.
“By integrating quantitative and qualitative data gathered from multiple official sources and through participative community engagement we can gain a holistic understanding of community safety that bridges the divide between official metrics and community reality,” the strategy reads.
Many of the organisations consulted in the drafting of the strategy were State bodies, such as Government departments, agencies or non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The latter featured heavily in 10 “bespoke, trauma informed focus groups” as they were believed to represent groups with a “specific experience of community safety”.
Some of the “target groups” represented by such organisations were older people; rural residents; people with “lived experience” of prison; LGBT people; migrants and refugees; and members of the Traveller and Roma communities.
The draft national strategy can be read in full here.