Ms Anna Quigley:

I thank the Cathaoirleach and members of the committee for giving me the opportunity to address them. The CityWide Drugs Crisis Campaign is a network of community organisations which are tackling the drugs crisis on the ground in our most disadvantaged communities. We represent the community sector in the national structures of the National Drugs Strategy.

I wish to comment today on the impact of gangland crime on the aforementioned communities. I will speak about the impact on communities in general and on young people in particular. In the context of the impact on communities, there are two issues. The first is low-level intimidation and the second, serious violence around drug-related debt.

On the issue of low-level intimidation, members will remember that 20 years ago when we first began to see activities related to the drugs market in local communities, those communities responded. They took action by taking to the streets and marching on drug dealers' homes. There was a community response whereby people said that they would not tolerate drug trade activities in their communities. That does not happen anymore and people often ask why that is the case. It does not happen because of the levels of violence associated with the drugs trade today. While most people in a community do not have direct experience of that violence and are not direct victims of it, the threat of violence is implicit at all times. It is a case of not crossing certain people because one knows what those people can do. People have described how they keep their eyes down, mind their own business and keep their mouths shut. It is almost impossible to describe the corrosive, negative effect this has on communities, day after day. In these communities, community bonds, links and supports helped people to survive in the past but these are being seriously undermined by low-level intimidation. That means that communities are more open to drug-trade related activities. It is important to point out that such low-level intimidation will never show up in Garda statistics because it is not a question of incidents happening but of fear. It only takes one shooting in an area for 30 or 40 people to be silenced. That is how it works. We should not underestimate the importance of low-level intimidation which is extremely corrosive over time.

Violence related to drug debt can range from horrific beatings right the way up to death, which is the ultimate punishment. There is no sense of proportion around this. The actual debt itself can be very small in some cases - €100 or €200, for example. It is not about the amount of money but the principle of paying a debt. This can have an impact on entire families. Often it is not just the drug users who are held responsible for the debt; their families and friends can be subjected to violence and intimidation too. We have heard of quite a number of young people who have committed suicide because of a drug debt but in some circumstances, the debt lives on. Their families have been told that they have inherited the debt, which is an absolutely horrific situation for them.

In many disadvantaged communities young people are growing up in an environment where the activities associated with the drugs trade have become normalised. Young people are looking out their windows at what is happening on the street and they do not see that the people involved in the drugs trade are being sanctioned in any way. That normalisation also means that the drugs trade has become part of local economies. Young people are making, from their point of view, rational economic decisions. They are in low-income families and have very limited opportunities to earn money. They see that within a very short space of time, say an hour, they can earn €100 or more by getting involved in the drugs trade in some way. That is a very appealing economic opportunity for many young people.

As Mr. Gough mentioned, intervention at the earliest possible stage is really important. It is crucial that we now have practical initiatives and responses in order to break the cycle. People out there have a sense of utter hopelessness and feel they can do nothing and cannot stand up to these people. It is extremely important that we do have initiatives, no matter how difficult it is. There are a number of initiatives in place on the ground, such as the community policing forums. There are major operations to tackle drug dealing and it is particularly important for young people to see there is a response from the police and the State. However, we always emphasise that it is not enough to have all the resources going into an operation if there is then no more policing for weeks afterwards. That does not work. If there is an operation, it must be backed up afterwards with day-to-day community policing. Otherwise it just reverts really quickly. We need both together. The National Family Support Network has established an intimidation reporting helpline in co-operation with the Garda. In every Garda station in the country there is a named person with responsibility for taking calls from families dealing with intimidation. In terms of breaking the silence, we are involved with the Health Research Board in auditing the extent and levels of intimidation citywide. Because of its nature, it is extremely difficult to put any kind of figure on it, but for policy reasons and to have it taken seriously we need to try and gather the data no matter how difficult that might be.

To back up what Mr. Gough said, youth interventions are crucially important. Young people are unsure whether they should get involved with the youth services and the alternatives they have to offer, or go out onto the road and earn €200 doing a message for a drug dealer. That is the choice they are facing and it is really hard to direct them the way we would want them to go. Youth services are crucially important and have been hit by significant cutbacks, which is making their work nearly impossible. Community services also cannot be emphasised enough, and I am afraid people in bureaucracies do not understand the importance of local community development projects. They do not get it - they look and ask what service is being delivered. They do not understand how important it is that people have that support so they can maintain their sense of having a right to stand up in their own community, a right to say "this is not acceptable and we should not have to live like this", a right to say they should not have people behaving like that within their own areas. All those community supports have been devastated.

While it is crucially important that we have practical initiatives, the reality is that poverty and disadvantage underlie all of this. The communities most affected are the poorest ones, and it is from those communities that the people carrying out the intimidation and violence come. If we do not seriously tackle poverty and disadvantage we will never deal with this problem. People do not like to hear that because they think it is too big an issue, but it is the truth.