The Department of Justice has said that Minister Helen McEntee is wasting no time in putting together a plan of action following the 73 recommendations in the Geiran report into Community Safety and Wellbeing in Drogheda. She hopes to have a plan of campaign ready by the end of the month.
After decades of underinvestment and neglecting the needs of people living in Drogheda’s disadvantaged areas, which have become the battlefields for savage and evil drug gangs, the government is finally to take remedial action.
As the Drogheda Gardaí make great strides towards defeating the gangs that have made life a misery for thousands of innocent people, the Department of Justice has committed to creating a social situation that is more conducive to creating peace and hopefully prosperity.
It’s a shame that it took the brutal murder and dismemberment of a teenager for them to finally sit up and take notice of how far we have sunk but “better late than never”.
When the Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee TD, commissioned Vivian Geiran, to carry out a “scoping” exercise into Community Safety and Wellbeing in Drogheda including the criminality and the damage it has caused to the lives of innocent people and the economy, she couldn’t have chosen a better person for the job.
From his years working in the Probation Service, Mr. Geiran will understand only too well the consequences of the failure to invest in young people and social infrastructure such as community centres, sports and leisure facilities and of course employment opportunities.
Mr. Geiran was very thorough in his research and in his excellent report, (you can read or download it HERE,) which is probably the most important document for the town/city of Drogheda in many years, he made over 70 recommendations.
Many of these recommendations are perfectly obvious to us who live in Drogheda where drug dealing is carried out openly on the streets and the unfortunate souls destroyed by addiction, the walking dead, have become too numerous to be considered unusual.
But, taken together, the report is a route map for the way out of this dreadful mess we have gotten into.
Commissioning and publishing a report is of course the easy part but acting on the advice therein is what matters. In the past, reports have had a nasty habit of disappearing from view shortly after they’ve been published.
It is vital to Drogheda that the Geiran report is not allowed to fall down the back of the filing cabinet though. Its recommendations on the challenges facing the community, including around crime prevention, youth services, drug addiction, education, infrastructure, and community development are far too important to be forgotten.
The good news is that the Department of Justice is thinking that way too.
A Department official told Drogheda Life that following the publication of the Geiran report, the development of an implementation plan are key actions in Minister McEntee’s Justice Plan 2021.
He also emphasised that they are not wasting any time on putting together a plan of action.
“Engagement is ongoing with relevant Government Departments with a view to finalising the implementation plan by the end of April” he said.
“As well as publishing the scoping report, the Department of Justice has identified some actions for early implementation which can be progressed in line with the finalisation of the implementation plan.
“This includes providing funding to the Red Door project and the Family Addiction Network.
“Funding of €150,000 has been secured from the Dormant Accounts Fund to contribute to the implementation of recommendations.”
He also said the Department will shortly be “engaging with those local bodies identified in the report as requiring additional funding as to their precise funding needs.”
But that is just the beginning, the total cost of Mr. Geiran’s recommendations will run to many millions of Euro but the social and economic cost of not implementing them is just too horrendous to contemplate.
