Community Alert 'the route to go'

If you didn't have an interest in Community Alert before listening to Margaret Quinn of Muintir na Tire, you'd be a zombie if you weren't enthusiastic after she spoke recently in Kilcullen, writes Brian Byrne.

A self-confessed height-challenged person ("at one meeting I was asked to stand up by someone who didn't know I already was") she's a bundle of energy far beyond her size. And at the recent Community and Sports Clubs Open Evening she left nobody in doubt but that Kilcullen should go the Community Alert route.

Margaret is the south-eastern region development officer for the Community Alert scheme operated by her organisation. She told the meeting of how Community Alert had helped communities in her region not just to deal with crime, but also to forge community links which helped bring people and their common problems closer together.

She noted that there's a wrong impression that Community Alert involves only the older people in a community. "Regardless of what age we are, we can all play our part," she said.

But she was adamant that Community Alert in itself will not solve all the problems of dealing with criminality in an area. "What it will do is lessen the opportunity for something to go wrong. That's all we can hope for, and anything achieved beyond that is probably a bonus."

Margaret acknowledged a traditional resistance, particularly in rural communities, in 'going to the Guards'. But she said it was important for communities 'to get to know your local Guards'.

That said, she believes that Community Alert is much more than just a focus on local crime. She showed a number of initiatives, including a laminated card which one community had published and distributed to all local homes, detailing emergency services and other useful numbers.

There's also the 'bottle in the fridge', a plastic container with details of medication and other medical information which people can keep in their fridge. "The reason for the fridge is that everybody has one, and in the areas where this is used, emergency personnel know to go to the fridge."

Another community produced a map showing the 320 houses in their area, with permission from those participating, detailing the name and phone number of each household in the area. This was distributed to the various emergency services, and subsequently to all the homes in the area.

A text messaging service in a community was funded by €10 a year from each participating member. It works by a text being sent to a specific phone by somebody who notices something untoward, and after the sender is verified, the message is sent on to the garda, who will then decide whether it should be widely broadcast.

Another group got involved in local health and mental health issues as a result of setting up Community Alert.

The Open Evening was organised under the auspices of Kilcullen 2017, the implementation group for the Development Plan which came out of the Community Survey commissioned last year by Kilcullen Community Action.