Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 3 October 2024
Committee on Drugs Use
A Health-Led Approach: Discussion (Resumed)
9:30 am
Mr. Gary Broderick:
I wanted to respond to the matter of how early the intervention needs to be. In the SAOL Project, we have a children's project where we work with one- to three-year-olds. We are already a little late. Part of it involves helping families to regulate and get used to mainstream services. You are then able to respond to the children's needs, including any developmental delays and recognising the impacts of generational trauma and parental trauma on the children.
That is present in every case we work with in the SAOL Project, but we do not get to work with every one of the children. If we could invest more in the children, that would be much better.
This ties into how we resource social workers and how they respond to women who have issues with addiction, because we are getting that wrong. It is brilliant that we focused attention with Hidden Harm on the way drug use can impact on children, but our response is not working. Putting children into care is putting them into a system that we have plenty of evidence to suggest is not working for other women.
I am not sure about the answer to the other question but Dr. Cullen spoke to it well earlier. Decriminalisation or legalisation cannot stand on its own. It is about how we invest, work on destigmatising and run the kinds of programme to which Dr. Lambert referred, which we have been running in respect of suicide and mental health. Over a period, we have changed public perceptions on that. It is about the destigmatising work and the investment. If we are to save money by decriminalising or legalising, it has to be channelled into the kinds of services we want.
No comments