Ms Grace Hill:

I thank the Chairman. There are two pieces there. The first concerns addressing and raising emerging needs. The current structures we have to do that are nothing short of a cat and mouse game. For instance, 12 months ago we met with the Minister of State with responsibility for drugs. He advised us to go to the mid-term review of the national drugs strategy and not to forget to go to the national office of the HSE. That meeting never happened with the national office. That sends us back down to HSE addiction services locally, which we work very well with, but they, like community drugs services, are not empowered to address our needs. There is, as Ms Quigley has said, a block in the system. We have a good relationship with the addiction services. We go to them and say: "Listen, crack cocaine, what can we do?" They ask us why we do not set up a project. That should not be the system. There is a clog in the system. The addiction services and HSE locally want to help us but the budgets are not coming to them either.

Regarding 1 January for us in Tallaght, we are concerned because we do not have any funding to address the crack issue. It is as simple as that. We have been plugging this with the very little money we have in a development fund because the task force is underfunded as well. We have been funding those two crack cocaine responses with €25,000 each. That equates to about three hours per week in terms of additional work on already struggling front-line services. It is serious for us. We have seen the value of what the services are doing on the ground.

As I said in my presentation, the figure of €500,000 demonstrates no understanding of how colossal this issue is. How long is a piece of string? We need to have that discussion. What does a real response to this issue look like? In terms of the country in Tallaght alone, €500,000 will not cut it. When we launched our report, we called for an additional €1 million fund. We felt we needed that to get us started and to be able to respond to this issue. I cannot even say that would be enough for the crack issue in Tallaght. That issue is only a symptom of the years of lack of restoration, as Ms Quigley talked about.

We need to make sure all front-line services are sustainable and equipped to address the challenges, given the years of cumulative budget reductions. As Mr. Hamilton said, an interagency approach is key. We need to make sure everybody is strong and able to respond to it on the ground.

We are worried about January because I have seen the service users that avail of these services. They are extremely vulnerable. We are in the winter months. As Mr. Hamilton said, some people are sleeping rough and we have women who have to resort to prostitution to pay off drug debts. I am concerned, as is our task force, that the supports are not there. By the nature of community drug services, they want to respond to these issues on the ground.