Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will conclude with a few comments. It is a position I have held for a number of years. We need to have a national debate on cannabis overall. It is a fact that in many homes and many social outlets in Ireland people consume cannabis. As a society we have chosen to ignore this for a long time. I lived in Belgium and in Holland for some time where the drug is regulated by the state through the departments of agriculture, health and policing. I am not suggesting for a moment that we should move immediately to a model like that, but there needs to be a national debate where perhaps we can look at the level of criminality around the dealing of these drugs and ask if there is a way the State can intervene to remove this layer of criminality, to look at a problem that is out there and to look at regulating it by perhaps taxing it and using quality control as they do in some other countries vis-à-vistheir departments of agriculture and so on. At the very minimum, a debate needs to happen on it. I do not have firm views either way but the debate should happen, and we should not be shying away from it.