Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will respond to that, if I may. Mr. Gerry Murphy is the treatment manager in Bushypark. He is a very kind and compassionate man and he is not going to tell somebody who is in floods of tears that while he is qualified to talk to them, he will not talk to them today because he is tied up with other work. That is not how he works or how anyone in the sector works. With the greatest of respect, Dr. Keenan has given an answer which is not reflective of real life. That is not how these services work. People scream out in their hour of need. Sometimes it can be at 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. at night, when Mr. Murphy or one of his colleagues is about to go home and I do not think the current funding model really grasps all of that.

In my remaining time, I want to make one more point. I grew up in rural County Clare and in my lifetime I had only seen a handful of drug deals taking place, with drugs passing hand to hand. Since being elected to Dáil Éireann, I get the train to Heuston Station and cycle along the quays on a Dublin Bike every day. I am aware of the really good and compassionate work undertaken by Merchant's Quay Ireland. I am aware of the really good quality care that is given inside that building but each and every day that I cycle past that building, I am appalled to see drug dealers lurking around corners like vultures, little packages of tinfoil and little white sachets of dope being passed hand to hand in the open air. It is wrong. The dealers know what they are doing. It is such a ready market. Addicts are coming out the front door, down the ramp and the dealers are waiting to top up the methadone they have been given. They are waiting to top it up with fully illegal drugs. It is like looking at a fox in a henhouse and it is all wrong. We need to look at that whole model. It bothers me that the last audit I saw by the HSE showed that up to 40% of those receiving methadone treatment had been receiving that treatment across a ten-year period. Merchant's Quay Ireland does fantastic work and I do not want to take from that but there is a need for a Garda presence. There has to be the hard law presence outside the building and the soft, caring presence inside. It bothers me that the people going through that door for treatment, for rehabilitation, are like lambs to the slaughter when they come back out because there is a drug dealer waiting there for them.

I want to add to what others have said about the need for a national debate on drugs, drug usage and decriminalisation. I am not sure exactly where I sit on that issue but there must be a debate on it. Perhaps it is time to remove a layer of criminality from it and to bring our health services further into that realm. We certainly do not want to become a gateway for all sorts of drugs but that debate needs to happen and this committee should lead it out.

I ask the Minister of State to respond to the key issue of addicts getting methadone treatment inside the Merchant's Quay Ireland building but when they go back out on the street, they are at the mercy of drug dealers. I also ask the Minister of State to speak today to those at the highest levels in An Garda Síochána to ensure that there is a constant policing presence in that area. We are not there to judge the addicts, the people receiving treatment, but by God, we have laws in Ireland bringing criminal justice to the realm of drug dealing and they need to be enforced at the doors of that building.