Mr. Hugh Greaves:

People have sought a number of things. One thing people are worried about is that while drug use is spreading across the country, and cocaine can be found in most towns and villages across the country, in certain areas there is still a complete overload in terms of frequency. That is reflected in opiate use as well. As for Dublin, the Rabbitte report of 1996 identified 12 areas. Those 12 areas are still the areas with the highest level of problematic drug use and the areas where you see the grooming of young men. It is not confined to those areas. It has spread to other cities, including Cork, Limerick and Athlone. We all know that. If we look into the various estates where this is happening, we can predict fairly accurately what kinds of estates it will happen in.

We have looked for a number of different things. From the point of view of Ballymun, we have looked for a huge rise in community policing. There has been an increase in drug policing, which is covert and undercover and is based on seizures and so forth, and that is very welcome. What the local community is looking for is visible policing. For example, when a garda arrests someone with an amount of cocaine on them, it takes two gardaí to process that. They are off the street for a couple of hours while they process that person. There has to be someone in the cell to supervise the search and so on. That might result in a garda being removed from the community for up to a day or maybe even two days, depending on the size of the seizure and so on. The local community then misses that garda for those couple of days while he or she does that really important drugs policing work. What they really want to see is high-visibility policing and people walking around the area. People might have seen the "Prime Time" programme that looked at drug dealing in the Ballymun area recently. What people were really looking for from that was visible policing that discourages people from gathering and disperses crowds and so on. That is one thing.

Another thing is that we know that some attempts have been made at grooming legislation to make it an offence to groom people for criminal offences. We would like to see that go further if possible and be much more specific on the offences surrounding organised crime and drug dealing in that area. Those are two things straight off.

In addition, a lot of money has been removed from youth services funding since 2008 and there has not been any particular visible increase in that funding. That needs immediate restoration.