Mr. Drew Harris:

There were many questions in that last contribution. Such a severe crime problem requires a full organisational response and it gets that. We have to put pressure on the local markets and the intermediate market regarding the movement of significant amounts of drugs and on international trafficking. There definitely are different layers involved. There is a national and international layer, which sees good co-operation with our partners in law enforcement throughout the world. At the national level, our national units and the local drug units do terrific work in chasing down dealers and making major seizures of drugs.

The performance in quarter one in 2019 compared to that in 2018, however, shows a 16% uplift in the number of controlled drugs offences. By and large, though, that is the result of proactive work by An Garda Síochána in making seizures ranging in size from small single amounts of drugs for single use right up to big seizures. As I stated earlier, hardly a week goes by when we do not have a major seizure of drugs, money or some of the weapons associated with such offences. We are very conscious of this almost "Uberisation", or whatever expression we want to use, of the delivery of drugs, especially in the context of the night-time economy and the specific operations we can put in place to address that. I refer to surveillance but also other preventative operations as well. We do not underestimate the extent of the drugs problem or the underlying crime problems that it drives, including violent crime and other crimes. Some addicts are driven to crimes of acquisition to get the money to pay for a drugs habit.

I do not know whether there is an overall criminal justice response on its own to this. There is a bit about how addicts are treated and that is a health problem. I sometimes wonder about some of the coverage of our vicious feuds. There seems to be an air of glamorisation around the characters involved and the violence visited upon people. It almost makes it seem as if it is some other world but it is happening in this city and people are losing their lives, suffering dreadful injury or living lives of intimidation because of it. There is a trail of human misery that is not properly picked up in some of the coverage I read.