Everything people ask before joining

Yes. Free to join, free to use, no card, and no paid tier on sale. There is nothing you can buy on this site today.

Patrol is run by Conjora Limited alongside the other CheckIreland sites. If a paid feature is ever introduced, it will be announced rather than discovered, and nothing described as free today will be moved behind it.

About a minute. Eircode, name, email, password. You confirm your email before you can post anything.

You can check what is happening in your area before any of that, on the homepage, without giving us anything.

No. Patrol works in any browser and can be added to your home screen from there, on iPhone and Android alike, where it behaves like an app.

There is also an Android app on Google Play. There is no iOS app.

That is the likely answer in most areas right now, and Patrol says so rather than hiding it — the area check on the homepage will tell you plainly.

Around 10 households on an estate is where an alert starts reaching somebody who can act on it. If you are the first, the useful thing you can do is send it to a group you are already in. That is genuinely how every active area on Patrol started; there is no other mechanism.

To work out which area you are in, and nothing else. Patrol reads the first three characters — the routing key, which covers a whole town or a Dublin postal district — and places you at the centre of that area.

The last four characters are the ones that identify a single letterbox. They are never used to locate you, never shown to another member, and never appear in an alert.

No. Patrol does not hold your address — it was never asked for. It does not show your Eircode, and it does not put a pin anywhere near your house.

The most precise location the product holds about any member is the centre of their town or postal district, which is the same point for everybody in that area.

No, and neither can anyone else. Patrol shows how many members are in an area, never who they are. There is no member directory and no endpoint that returns one.

A list of which households on an estate are signed up would be a useful document for exactly the wrong person.

Not to your neighbours. Anything you post carries your first name and last initial, because an area where anyone can post anything unattributed becomes a rumour mill very quickly.

You are anonymous to everybody else: nothing on Patrol is public, nothing is indexed by search engines, and a logged-out visitor sees no real reports at all.

Your name, email address, Eircode, the area it resolves to, and anything you post. A phone number only if you choose to give one. That is the whole list.

Data is held on EU servers, and is not sold, rented or shared with advertisers.

Yes, from your own dashboard, without emailing anybody. Your account and everything you posted are removed from the database.

You can also ask for a copy of what we hold, under GDPR, by emailing hello@patrol.ie.

No. Patrol is independent, has no Garda relationship of any kind, and is not part of any official scheme.

Posting on Patrol does not report anything to anybody official. Report crime to your local Garda station, or the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666 111.

Ring 999 or 112. Patrol is not monitored — nobody is reading it on your behalf, at any hour of the day.

Patrol is for telling neighbours things afterwards, not for getting help now.

Up to 5km from the centre of your area, for every member. There is no smaller radius on a cheaper plan, because there is no cheaper plan.

The distance is measured from area centre to area centre, not from house to house — Patrol does not know where either house is.

Yes, once your email is confirmed. The form asks what happened, roughly where, roughly when, and what neighbours might do about it.

It will not let you make it about a person. No names, no addresses, no registration plates, no photos of identifiable people, and no accusations. Report what you saw, not who you think did it.

No, and the product says so on every one. An alert is a community report: one neighbour’s account of what they saw, labelled as such so nobody mistakes it for an official statement.

Patrol does not confirm reports, does not rate them, and does not present anything as verified information.

Every alert has a report control. It takes one tap, asks for a reason, and comes to a person who reads it.

Posts that name or accuse an individual, identify a house, or carry abuse are removed, and accounts that do it repeatedly are removed too.

Not yet — there is no in-product blocking or muting, and we would rather say that than imply otherwise. Reporting a post brings it to us, and abuse toward a member is grounds for removing the account that sent it.

If somebody is bothering you on Patrol, email hello@patrol.ie and it will be dealt with by a person.

Yes, and an area that arrives together is the only kind that works from day one. You already have the hard part — a list of households and a way to reach them.

We will give you a shared invite link that credits joins to your group, and a short explainer you can circulate before asking anyone to sign up. Email hello@patrol.ie.

Not yet. There is no approval queue, no pinning, and no coordinator moderation panel in the product today; content reports come to us and we act on them.

We are saying so plainly because a committee that recommends Patrol to fifty households should not find this out afterwards.

WhatsApp is better for conversation, and if your group is working, keep it. Patrol does the parts a group chat is bad at: everyone in the area is reachable without swapping phone numbers, reports have a consistent shape, and something posted three months ago is still findable.

It is also open to the neighbours nobody thought to add — which, for a neighbourhood watch, is usually the households that most need to hear.

Plenty of areas will sensibly use both.

A Facebook group is open to anyone with an account, from anywhere. Patrol members are placed by Eircode, so an alert about your estate is written by somebody in your area and read by people in your area.

And nothing on Patrol is public: there is no feed a stranger can browse and no post a search engine can index.