Mr. Cathal O'Regan:

There was one very specific issue which was the level of financial support that kinship carers are entitled to compared with what foster carers are entitled to. There was a call from those involved in kinship caring to equalise that difference because it would make a significant difference, not just financially but in terms of the access to psychological supports and other things that family members need.

As Mr. Reid said, there is a reality that in communities in both urban and rural Ireland, there are family members who are getting together through family resource centres or through family support networks to provide one another with support as their loved ones are going through addiction challenges. That is something that we, as the citizens' assembly, felt could be significantly increased and strengthened.

On the question of education, a big focus of the citizens' assembly was on prevention. A dedicated meeting focused on prevention and the role of the education system. One thins that everybody, including the Garda, said was that policing your way out of the drugs problem cannot be done; you cannot simply focus on policing. You have to focus on the upstream question, which is how do you prevent people from starting to use drugs in the first instance or, if they are using drugs, how do you stop them from becoming problematic drug users. That is the whole area of prevention. It seems to me the assembly members felt that Ireland is very weak at prevention.

We heard information that only a small fraction of secondary schools provide proper prevention education and that normally only kicks in when in transition year. That is far too late for the young people in our society. At this stage, we have generations of adults who have never been exposed to any proper drug prevention information and that is one of the root causes of why we are seeing such a rate of prevalence in society. There was a call for a really significant increase in the preventative strategies, both for primary prevention, which is stopping people using drugs, but also secondary and tertiary prevention.