Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 24 October 2024
Committee on Drugs Use
Family and Community: Discussion
9:30 am
Mr. Robert Whiteley:
I want to come in on the point Mr. Ducque made about a criminal record, especially for young people. For a lot of the young people we work with, whether they are from the Traveller or settled community, when trauma is in the mix, it leads to drug use and criminality.
My view on the Criminal Justice (Spent Convictions and Certain Disclosures) Act 2016 would be that it only allows for your convictions to be spent after a seven-year period but if you have a conviction for more than one of dangerous driving, theft or possession of drugs, your convictions can never be spent. Those sorts of crimes are inevitable when people are caught up in addiction; they come hand-in-hand.
The reason people get addicted to drugs goes back to trauma related to stuff that happened early on in their lives that is no fault of their own. They have been let down for years. They fall into this circle. When they pick up these charges later on in life, these convictions will be with them for the rest of their life. It damages their future life opportunities and they are caught in that trap.
We engage with them as youth workers and community workers. We try to help people progress but they are caught; they have an anchor on them because of something they did years previously.
People do recover and change. I come across many people who come from that background. They would have been in St. Patrick's Institution because of drug addiction and stuff but now have degrees and are involved in youth or community work in the caring professions trying to help these other people, but their life opportunities are diminished as well. They cannot travel to America, Australia or Canada because of stuff that happened years ago.
I really believe that people deserve a second chance. If you can prove to society that you have changed and you can do this through, for example, achieving a degree and stuff, and you are working and contributing to society, you should be granted a second chance. You should have your previous convictions expunged. We really need to look at an expunging process here in Ireland and move away from the punitive sort of approach that it will stay with you for the rest of your life.
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