Ms Jackie McKenna:

Supporting the family to make the choices they need to make and equipping them with the skills and the knowledge they may need has a knock-on effect on the rest of the family and they can divert people away from drugs. We recently teamed up with Extern in Dundalk to develop an intensive family support package that will help to break the cycle of criminality. It is about involving the people who are the most impacted in the solutions. It has to be voluntary. That is what we are working on.

It is the same with the drug debt and intimidation reporting programme. It is about building up the trust within communities because they are gripped by fear. There is an opportunity to build trust between An Garda Síochána and the people on the ground because, as has been said, policing it is very difficult because there are Snapchat accounts for dealers and it is all anonymised. It is very hard to crack down that way, but if we all work together and have joined-up thinking then we can make progress.

I agree with the point that was made about the recent cocaine report. One good thing that I got from it is that for the first time ever there was a decrease in smoking. It just goes to show that if the Government and all the Departments work together, they could turn things around with addiction, the same as they did with the smoking revolution, and make it a priority in a health-led approach instead of a criminal one. Who would ever have thought that the smoking campaign would be successful, yet here is proof of it? I feel we should be concentrating on it.