Mr. Niall Mulligan:

Yes. Deputy Kelleher asked who would develop and run a campaign. All stakeholders involved in this area should develop and run a campaign, especially people living with HIV. No campaign should be developed without them.

Deputy Ó Caoláin asked about snow blow and what has been the response to drug users. The figure for drug users has been going down for a number of years, which can be related to a harm reduction response to drug use and the introduction of methadone and needle-exchange programmes. Hopefully, as Deputy Costello has pointed out, medically supervised injecting centres will be part of the landscape in the not too distant future.

In 2014, figures for drug use started to increase and we were not too sure whether it was a spike in numbers or a trend. Unfortunately, the trend has continued into 2015. The response was quick from a public health perspective. Therefore, public health organisations and many NGOs within the sector, particularly within the addiction sector, met earlier this year and developed a quick response. It was a targeted response to the issue, as there was no point in conducting a general campaign because it was a particular cohort of drug users - injecting drug users. In response we had the usual posters from community drug teams and community projects.

More specifically, they worked with the outreach workers who already had relationships with those drug users and tried to get two messages across, namely, the message that has always been there from a needle syringe programme about not sharing needles or paraphernalia and the message about safer sex. What we have been told by the various community drug teams around Dublin is that this is down to a mixture of sharing paraphernalia and more sexual activity rather than heroin use.