Mr. Shane Hamilton:

We have discussed the visibility of intimidation at shop fronts over the past year with our colleagues from Killinarden and other front-line drug services. Across Tallaght, specifically west Tallaght, every corner shop has large numbers of young people who are involved in the drug trade in some way standing outside it. We are not saying that every one of those individuals is a criminal. These are also vulnerable young people who have perhaps become mixed up in the wrong activities. However, they are standing around each shop. There are also orchestrated and sophisticated drug marketing gangs, who promote drugs through texts and social media. Members of those gangs stand outside post offices every day to ensure that when people collect their social welfare payments or go to pay their utility bills for heating and electricity, they must pay back the gang first. This is a stark and dystopian version of what is becoming a modern urban area. We need to look at how we can sophisticatedly respond.

We have had great conversations. As my colleague, Ms Hill, said, we have been speaking to community gardaí and looking at how we can respond. Those gardaí told us that seizures are one element but they cannot just move people 100 yd down the road and allow them to continue to be involved in the same market. I understand that challenge. However, how are families meant to enter and exit their local shops or achieve any levels of recovery in the community while having to deal with that issue? It takes us back to the same point, which is to ask how we can modernise the responses to this problem.

To return to the point the Chairman made about buddy systems, it is drug workers who will be driving down to a local shop to help someone pay a utility bill. Drug workers can organise family support workers to ensure families can go up to the shops, pay their heating and electricity bills, and do their shopping. These families need a lot of supports at these early stages of change. They need to try to remove themselves from these communities. However, gangs are using very sophisticated marketing strategies, as well as brutal intimidation outside shops. The question of how we are going to respond must be brought into the modern conversation.