Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 3 October 2024
Committee on Drugs Use
A Health-Led Approach: Discussion (Resumed)
9:30 am
Ms Paula Kearney:
A lot of investment is needed to create the conditions for young women to feel empowered, but that is very hard to do in some communities. I come from the north inner city of Dublin and live in Finglas. Those are two communities where it is very hard to create those conditions. Someone was talking about handbags and women being groomed into this life, but it applies also to men being groomed into this life. You can totally understand how easily they can be sucked into it because there are not many other options for them.
To return to the question as to how a criminal conviction can impact on recovery, if someone falls into addiction and is trying to move on with their life but has been groomed into it such that it is all they know, and if they have any convictions for, say, having had enough for a few joints, as opposed to for having been drunk and disorderly, they could have been working on themselves and done a lot of work but then decided to go back to college because they wanted a job. Unfortunately, a lot of people who come from that background go into social care work because, a lot of the time, that is all that is on offer for them, and it relates to the Garda vetting and so on. Having a conviction for possession of drugs can lead an employer to just put the person's CV aside and not ask what the conviction related to. It can really impact on the person moving forward.
It is about investing from a young age but I must re-emphasise that in the context of women and girls, we must really invest in female-specific services. Nobody knows what is going on for girls in their homes, what they carry when they go out with their boyfriends and so on. All of that leads to trauma over trauma, and if they do not have a safe space to talk to someone and express that trauma, that will just continue.
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