The Department of Justice has been accused of scuppering its own plans to introduce CCTV (closed-circuit television) systems in local communities by setting an unrealistic deadline for applications to the scheme.
The Community-Based CCTV Scheme, launched by Michael McDowell last June, provides grants to community groups to install CCTV cameras to monitor on-street criminal and anti-social activity.
The scheme will provide 70 per cent funding for the cameras, to a maximum of €100,000. The community group must raise at least 15 per cent - the remainder can be sought from public bodies, including local authorities.
The community groups must meet the running costs of the system for at least five years and must have the support of the local authority to act as "data controller".
The deadline for applications is September 20th. However, Dublin City Council, the local authority likely to be involved in the majority of applications, cannot have provisions in place by that time.
"The local authority is going to be approached for matched funding that it doesn't have," Labour councillor Emer Costello said. "It's going to be asked to be a data controller, without having the necessary provisions or staff in place, and it's going to be asked to support applications before the councillors have had a chance to discuss the scheme."
The scheme must be discussed by the elected representatives before it could be ratified by the council, Ms Costello added.
The plan will be put to the committees for the different city areas before it comes before the full city council. It is unlikely to be fully debated before the council's monthly meeting in October.
"We're going to have to establish how we're going to manage this scheme," she said. "We're going to need to develop a policy on it, we're going to need to set up a unit and, from somewhere, find funding."
Community groups, some of which had been campaigning for years, had been given little guidance on applying for the grant, and many were not even aware of its existence, Ms Costello added.
The responsibilities on communities would be massive. Not only would they have to raise funds to set up the system, they would have to fund its operation as the Department of Justice will not pay for the running cost.
The department seemed to have given little thought to the legal implications, for community groups and local authorities: "There could be all sorts of sensitive information on these tapes - there are issues of privacy, data protection. No thought, no provision has gone into this - it seems crazy."
Ms Costello said the department did not want to encourage applications to the scheme because of the expense involved.
"The Department of Justice has washed its hands of the whole CCTV roll-out because it's just too much to handle."
A spokesman for the department said no cap had been put on the total funding for the scheme. The scheme was announced on June 15th - this gave adequate time to meet the deadline, he said.
The assistant city manager for housing, social and community services, Brendan Kenny, said it would be impossible to have provisions for the scheme in place by the deadline, but that the management would be "only too glad to work towards getting these projects up and running".
