DonabatePortrane.net

Ok, so there have been two major incidents involving a car being hijacked/stolen and someone assaulted in the recent weeks.

I personaly didn't know there was a methadone clinic servicing people outside the area. Clearly these people are deciding to hijack a car rather than wait around for a train. I'm also wondering if the recent hijack of a car in Swords by a druggie was someone who got the bus from Donabate and found that was the last stop.

This is THE major issue at present as far as I'm concerned. I will be writing to our TDs to ask that this clinic be closed down as it is inappropriate for a village with no garda presence. I ask that you all do too.


http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/co ... 12303.html

i've always heard about this methodone clinic as have most of the people i have spoken to about it, but of course it's never been confirmed.

why do we have this clinic here? we dont have a spiralling drug problem amongst Donabate residents.
do malahide have a methodone clinic?

despite what people will tell you we have a huge amount of junkies (couldn't care less if thats not politically correct) roaming our village. i dont know whether or not it relates to this clinic but i can only presume it does. im not saying they are all robbing people or anything but for a supposed quiet town we have an extrodinarily high amount of them. many people i have spoken to say they arent from this area. So why are they coming here in such large large numbers?

there will be people saying i'm talking rubbish and scaremongering etc but im not. i spend time in the village every weekday and talk to a lot of people.

not one candidate for council in May mentioned this clinic. i dont see the two sitting donabate/portrane councillors bringing it up now either. why? why is it so hush hush?

i'd like the answers to a few questions and i will be passing them on to the councillors also, though i would appreciate it if they responded here (we know you read this )

1. is there a methodone clinic in donabate?
2. if so, why was it located in donabate?
3. where do you stand as a councillor of the location of this clinic in donabate?
4. will you look to get it relocated?

We are a peninsula, completely off the beaten track (which i assume is why it was dumped on us tucked out of the way). We dont have a Garda presence, yet we are expected to facilitate heroin addicts, who most likely have and do commit crimes to feed their addiction.

http://www.hse.ie/eng/services/list/1/L ... ublin.html

Maybe its one of these satellite clinics listed at the bottom of the link attached. Swords, Donabate, Howth
and a few other areas are listed.

It would be interesting to see if there is a link between the clinic opening times (Sunday Afternoon 2pmish?) and the visits to the area by these nut jobs.If they know the opening times the Garda should be on duty in the village and surrounding areas for as long as its open.

I dont notice that many junkies in the village if Im honest.

OU812 wrote:http://www.hse.ie/eng/services/list/1/L ... ublin.html

Maybe its one of these satellite clinics listed at the bottom of the link attached. Swords, Donabate, Howth
and a few other areas are listed.

It would be interesting to see if there is a link between the clinic opening times (Sunday Afternoon 2pmish?) and the visits to the area by these nut jobs.If they know the opening times the Garda should be on duty in the village and surrounding areas for as long as its open.

I dont notice that many junkies in the village if Im honest.

There you go. Come on Junkies -
Donabate Satellite Clinic, Donabate Health Centre, Donabate, Co Dublin Tel 01 8436079 Fax 01 8434318

This is a parent’s worst nightmare. Children should not have to experience such things. A parent can do nothing in this situation, afraid that their response may trigger a horrific reaction from the intruder – who is probably on heroin. €20.00 and less will buy you a fix of heroin on the streets of Dublin.

Earlier this year, a man was sentenced to two life sentences for the rape of two children (six and nine years old) in Athlone. I ask you as readers, why do we have another case of a convicted rapists/addict (with a string of convictions) walking our streets without any monitoring of his whereabouts.

Garda response times in Donabate are poor (due to a lack of resources - Gardaí have to travel from Swords (assuming a Garda car is available)). I am aware of a separate incident that occurred on Sunday (same day) where the intruder climbed through a first floor window. This occurred at 1215 hours (during the day). The residents were in the house at the time. Could it be the same person or is it a group?

As a member of the Donabate/Portrane community, I did not know that there is a Methadone Clinic in Donabate. I am not aware of any drug problems in Donabate that warrants a Methadone Clinic. I guess that the HSE put this in place without public consultation with the residents of the Donabate/Portrane community. This Methadone Clinic is servicing addicts from the North and South regions of our community because it has a train station – REALITY! The same train that our children take to/from school!

Residents have a right to public consultation on proposed planning and services that will directly affect their community and safety of its residents. Government and public representatives, wake-up, remember who and what you represent!

Anyone have contact details for our local Councillors? I'll have look around too but if someone has them handy in meantime too please. Thank you.
This is just disgusting and terrifying.

Took the following from the discussion on the topic of the 33D bus route. Assume it's correct?

The local councillors in the Swords Electoral district are as follows;
Cllr. Philip Lynam, Sinn Fein, Philip.Lynam@cllrs.fingal.ie, 0851259902
Cllr. Darragh Butler, Fianna Fáil, Darragh.Butler@cllrs.fingal.ie, 0879595378
Cllr. Adrian Henchy, Fianna Fáil, Adrian.Henchy@cllrs.fingal.ie, 0876814485
Cllr. Joe Newman, Independent, Joe.Newman@cllrs.fingal.ie, 0872457729
Cllr. Eugene Coppinger, Anti Austerity Alliance, Eugene.Coppinger@cllrs.fingal.ie, 0872327412
Cllr. Anne Devitt, Independent, Anne.Devitt@cllrs.fingal.ie, (01)8409728 or 0868123435
Cllr. Paul Mulville, Independent, Paul.Mulville@cllrs.fingal.ie, 0863787395
Cllr. Justin Sinnott, Independent, Justin.Sinnott@cllrs.fingal.ie, 0868426545
Cllr. Duncan Smith, Labour Party, Duncan.Smith@cllrs.fingal.ie, 0879862686

Thank you Lo-cal.
I dread to think what type of place Donabate is turning into. Working in the city and seeing all sorts of strung out individuals, crimes, etc the thought of coming home to the same is just too much.

Hi all, I have written a number of emails to Adrian Henchy in which I asked what was the story with the recent surge in crime aorund Donabate; while he's very quick to reply, his answers have been kind of unhelpful so far. He acknowledges the problem - and he speaks about some meeting with 'Superintendent Ronan Galligan' - which afaik hasn't happened as of today. He also suggested that "he [the superintendent] will meet soon but has given me assurances that they will put extra man power down here in the interim" - which obviously hasn't happened either - given the steady rise in the number of accidents.

I'm thinking that maybe, all people who care about Donabate, should just get together one of the upcoming week-ends and make some (peaceful) noise - either here in Donabate or in Swords? I think the only way out of this mess is to raise the public attention to our local issues - if this gets some kind of attention (other than the usual 10 lines story in the newspaper), I'm sure Garda will follow.

Could the community council organise a public meeting with local cllrs, reps from local authority, gardai and HSE in attendance

Might be worthwhile as an initial step

Here is what I would like to do: everytime there is a criminal caught in donabate, be it car robbery, car jacking, assault, whatever, that we the citizens are told if these criminal are related to one of the social schemes or they are not.

If no-one using the methadone clinic, sophia housing whatever is related to any of these crimes well then the attention should be turned elsewhere and they should not be getting blamed. If they are are, then we need to know what steps are being taken to deal with the issues. The thing is Donabate is the sticks. It is awkward to get to. So I can't help but thinking something is drawing them out.

Latest from Adrian:

"Yes I did hear and I phoned Seargant Toner yesterday if explained to me that an arrest has been made.

I recently attended a joint policing committee meeting were I discussed at length the issues here in Donabate & Portrane. It was explained to me that all over Fingal from Malahide to Swords and across to Donabate there has been a recent surge in Criminal behaviour and especially House Break ins. I am working hard to significantly improve both a Gardai presence and crime prevention resources on the peninsula. However as you can appreciate every community is looking for the same and in recent years large numbers of Gardai have retired and there has been no recruitment."

It stil doesn't seem that this is being taken seriously; I haven't seen any other town around Dublin mentioned as frequently as Donabate in the last few months.

It looks like theres a possibility that the new postcode system could be a mess:
http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints ... 97037.html

But one of the benefits could/should be the ability to make available very precise crime statistics, as they do in the UK:

http://www.crime-statistics.co.uk/postcode/SL38RP

I'd like to see a breakdown of the various crimes in Donabate. Theres hard evidence for some of the more extreme ones, because they get reported in the media. But anything else, like burglaries (or even some serious ones like child abduction attempts), have only anecdotal evidence. I'm tempted to start documenting these myself.

Mr. Stupid wrote:Here is what I would like to do: everytime there is a criminal caught in donabate, be it car robbery, car jacking, assault, whatever, that we the citizens are told if these criminal are related to one of the social schemes or they are not.

If no-one using the methadone clinic, sophia housing whatever is related to any of these crimes well then the attention should be turned elsewhere and they should not be getting blamed. If they are are, then we need to know what steps are being taken to deal with the issues. The thing is Donabate is the sticks. It is awkward to get to. So I can't help but thinking something is drawing them out.

Sent you a PM....

Quello Serio wrote:[...]
I'd like to see a breakdown of the various crimes in Donabate. Theres hard evidence for some of the more extreme ones, because they get reported in the media. But anything else, like burglaries (or even some serious ones like child abduction attempts), have only anecdotal evidence. I'm tempted to start documenting these myself.

Great idea Quello Serio, anecdotal or not, it's always valuable information. It may be worth getting in touch with Donabate Village community on Facebook, they are in the process of setting up text alert service so potentially a great source of data.

I agree with Mr. Stupid that it's hard not to get impression that something is drawing scumbags to Donabate, it's hard not to think this way given the regularity of incidents.
We badly need some data. At the moment crime in Donabate clearly goes unnoticed - have a look at this crime map:
http://airo.maynoothuniversity.ie/exter ... oring-tool (use Internet Explorer, it's not working correctly in Chrome)
Donabate has zero (0) offences, we're blessed!

Data comes from CSO and An Garda Síochána (originally from the PULSE system). My worry is that this is exactly the data that officials look at when people from Donabate complain and think 'what are they moaning about?'.

This Methadone Clinic is running in the Village for several years. It started in 2007 in st Ita's and the finally moved to the Health Centre. Donabate Community Council knew about it and the Chairperson Bob Dowling at the time fought against it. While it is definitely not something you want to see in the area it probably doesnt explain the upsurge in scumbags frequenting the area and the types of crime we have seen lately. I dont think its just Donabate though. In Swords a woman and her two children were threatened by a man with an axe while they were waiting for the windscreen to thaw on Wednesday.

It is quite concerning to see the level of escalation of incidents recently. Don't think that's down the the methodone clinic as that's been there for a number of years now. Either way, we do need to understand what is driving the increased crime rate & that isn't readily available at the moment so it's hard to see things improving if we are not clear on what is causing the problem.

The guy that hijacked the car at the golf club a few weeks back was from Mayo with an address in Blanchardstown.

This latest hijack guy was from south inner city. Clearly something is bringing characters like this to Donabate. If they came out to rob they probably would have had their own transport.


It would be good if our local councillors could ask Swords gardai what they have discovered from their investigations into these.

Presumably methadone clinics have to be somewhere. Why not here? Strikes me that a methadone clinic on a Sunday afternoon in a fairly safe community is a good place for one to be.

acdublin wrote:Presumably methadone clinics have to be somewhere. Why not here? Strikes me that a methadone clinic on a Sunday afternoon in a fairly safe community is a good place for one to be.

I hope this isn't a trolling comment......

Well, he's got a point. They could enjoy a stroll on the cliff path while they are here, maybe wander up to Newbridge for a look at the ducks.

Derek wrote:

acdublin wrote:Presumably methadone clinics have to be somewhere. Why not here? Strikes me that a methadone clinic on a Sunday afternoon in a fairly safe community is a good place for one to be.

I hope this isn't a trolling comment......

Having seen Andy's previous posts, I'd very much doubt that it is. I agree with him to a point, but I think the issue is that there are sporadic transport links to Donabate particularly on a Sunday and that has led to two car thefts that we know off. These may or may not be linked to the Methadone clinic, but that's two in the last few weeks that happened on Sunday afternoon which is very coincidental.

Does anyone know why we have a methodone clinic here ? Do we have the numbers in the area ?

I would like to find out what the spread of junkies is in the various boroughs around Fingal...and where the clinics are. Does anyone know if this data is available ?

It may not be possible to say that a particular facility (via it's visitors/residents whatever) is responsible for an upsurge but what we can say is that the more of lawbreakers we give reason to come here, the greater the risk to our children and families.

The story in the indo is truly shocking, Time to do something about this methinks - we should not have to bear more than our fair share.

My bad if it was an "irony" comment....

No, not irony or trolling at all. Mathadone clinics are recognised as an important (early) step in the rehabilitation of heroin users. Having them in areas that are accessible and offer fewer 'distractions' for the users is probably helpful. I don't think methadone clinic users are the danger to our children that some might lead you to believe. Wouldn't it be good for us to use our privilege to help in some way? Giving help might come at a cost and sacrifice but most help does.