Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their exceptional opening statements and the wealth of knowledge and input we will experience during this meeting. I will need to leave at 10.30 a.m. to take the Order of Business in the Seanad as Acting Leader, but I will follow the proceedings here thereafter.

It cannot be said enough - I do try to say it every week - that people are not drug addicts but babies who were once brought home from hospital and cherished, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, fathers and uncles, and people with dreams, ambitions and hopes for themselves. More than anything, we need to state that. We cannot state it enough. Each of the witnesses reflected in different places and in different ways that we must have a very dramatic intervention on stigma, on attitudes, on not treating people as whole individuals who happen to have a particular issue that requires a comprehensive health treatment that includes mental as well as physical health.

I am chair of a drugs task force. I was very heartened yesterday that we got an update from the Minister of State, Colm Burke, on the implementation of the budget and in it he mapped the recommendations from the citizens' assembly report onto how that is reflected in the budget strategy. It is the first time I have seen that since the report came out. Number one on that was reducing stigma and what the Government was going to do about ensuring that people are, as holistic human beings, treated with the dignity and the support they deserve.

Davina's story demonstrates how invisible women are. I recently had to engage with a group that talked about young girls being courted, to use an old-fashioned word, with Marc Jacobs bags and all the rest. Then they are groomed into carrying drugs by guys who they think love them and, because of their home background and their emotional vulnerability, they mistake what love is. Part of it is a strategy because gardaí often travel as two men walking so they cannot search a woman if they do a stop-and-search or anything like that. We are all probably on the same page in our views on the merits of stop-and-search. Young girls are being groomed and then it is only a matter of time before they go down the Davina route, and it is important that we intervene.

Where I want to get to is culture. How do we dramatically intervene in the culture, even in health services, even in the context of people not being pigeonholed into one aspect of a part of their life such that it does not define who they are? How do we tackle that in the short term? We all agree that we are moving to a health-led approach. I certainly see my colleagues in government moving to such an approach.

Legislation will follow in time from the recommendations of this committee and so on, but how do we seize that culture by the scruff of the neck and go for it?