Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am not a member of the committee but decided I would butt in. I apologise. I was told we had the guts of an hour. I listened to a considerable amount of the discussion before I made my journey in and as Deputy Ward said, it has been incredibly useful. Some of the questions I was going to ask have been answered. I will do what I generally do and engage in a brain dump. I might add that mine is a very damaged brain. As has been said, if we are talking about people who are looking for treatment for drug addiction or whatever else, we all know the hoops and obstacles that are involved. The people in question must also be in the frame of mind to be looking for help. There was a considerable amount of conversation about telling white lies and all the rest of it. That happens constantly. Sometimes, in fairness, those who are offering services are in on it. The whole thing is a scam. It is a needs-must situation and a very Irish solution. It can even be a cross-Border solution where I live.

Ms McGillivary spoke about something that has been said to me in the past by people working in addiction and homeless services. The true treatment that people pursue is by making the decision that the only way they will get clean is by going to jail. People rack up a lot of convictions, which is relatively easy to do, so they can go to prison for a year or more. They become clean and come out of prison but then find themselves involved with the Simon Community, or whatever other service, with a hell of a lot of time to hang around to contemplate the debts they owe. They find themselves operating in the same places with the same cohorts of people. The comparison we always use is with GIs coming back from Vietnam. It was thought there would be a problem with heroin addiction but those people were addicts in Da Nang, Khe Sanh and Saigon. When they returned to Pennsylvania, New York and wherever else, they were able to break that addiction. However, that does not apply to people who are returning to the same street corners. There is no part in this that works.

To move completely to a consideration of addiction, it is brilliant that we are talking about a citizens' assembly on drug use and entering into a conversation about a health-led response, harm reduction and all the rest of it. However, none of that will matter to making people's lives better unless services are available. We talk about the Portuguese model. Are we considering making services available for people who are coming out of jail to ensure they are given support to put them in a place to go through education, get employment and all the rest of it in order to break cycles?

The reason we have thrown this issue to the citizens' assembly and that politics has failed to deal with it is because we do not know how to sell the idea to a 50-year-old middle-class guy who does not realise his son is taking cocaine with everyone else after winning a GAA match at the weekend until it becomes a problem. That man will likely say we are going easy on addicts and will use a derogatory term about those who are in addiction. There are no proposals for change from that man, from politicians or from anyone else who talks about the issue. What we are doing at the moment is not working in any way from a criminal justice point of view. I am not proposing this because it would be utterly nuts, but what if somebody was to come out and say we could have street executions, along with carpet-bombing Colombia on a day-to-day basis? That would be a way to reduce supply. We could probably change the rules of engagement with drug dealers, of whom I am not particularly fond. However, I think such an approach would put us in breach of a number of rules. Even those people who talk particularly hard about the issue do not want such an approach.

That is one disaster.

When a politician is dealing with someone, be it a case of dual diagnosis or even a worse-case scenario where you are dealing with somebody with psychosis, we all know we do not have the beds for mental health. Depending on what time of the day or night this happens, the person goes to accident and emergency in Our Lady of Lourdes hospital in Louth. There is no facility there to assess, so the person is sent to the Drogheda department of psychiatry in Crosslanes, where technically the consultants or doctors there are meant to deal with those in beds, of which there are not enough. Someone will come out and the assessment will be imperfect. Eventually, dual diagnosis will be the means by which the person is dealt with. I get that idea. Until we offer enough services, even if we get through that no wrong door, we will still have a huge difficulty. Gardaí will say that they fill out forms or get the forms done. What you are generally doing is throwing one person out of a bed to put another person in it. I am detailing what Ms Murphy already knows. We can talk about everything from the perspective of offering a better service but we do not have anywhere near the infrastructure to do it.

The witnesses spoke about pilots. I will use the example of Turas Counselling Services in Dundalk, which was given money for a dual diagnosis community project. The money has run out and Turas Counselling Services is keeping it going through self-funding, hoping that it can build up the evidence base to allow it to go back in. This State just loves pilots. We overstretch them or do not apply them across the board, or they exist in a little silo where obviously it is the only place dual diagnosis is dealt with. None of this is positive. That is before you deal with the fact that they will do the same complaining as everyone else in these groups, namely, that they get paid less, because they are in the community, they do not get multi-annual funding, they are cutting their cloth to suit their measure and they are dealing with a huge number of people so they are willing to use the baling twine to keep the engine going. None of this works.

I realise that none of this is a question. The witnesses have answered most of them. We know there should be no wrong door. My question concerns trauma-informed services. I spoke to the Chair earlier and I think she had been approached by some of the same people I had been approached by. We all get the idea. A number of the interventions from both sides of the room concerned the fact that you need to ensure everybody is trained in everything they will need, be that where the addiction piece meets the mental health service.

My question concerns eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing, EMDR, therapy, which has been used by the US military. It got very good at training people to kill people but the outworkings of that are significant levels of PTSD. This supposedly has been very useful in treating it. I would like to hear the witnesses' view on that because I get it. We do not have enough services and we need more of them. We need to ensure everyone who should be trained is trained. We know there are many other issues regarding payments.

We can have the best framework and modalities of care but none of it will make any difference, no more than the citizens' assembly and decriminalisation will, until we have that piece of paper and follow through on the reports, of which there have been many, and beyond that, until we put the people and resources in place instead of people who are using baling twine and doing extra in their own time. That is not sustainable in the long term.