Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The witnesses are welcome and I thank them for their presentations. The overarching point has been made well. Concentrated and problematic drug use does not happen in isolation. It happens, in the main, in areas of severe disadvantage, which is where the task forces are located. We can talk about the importance of co-ordination and all of that but it is budgetary decisions that influence the level of poverty in the country. I will make the following point very quickly.

What we have seen in recent budgets is a widening of the gap between rich and poor, and that is the approach that has been taken. It is entirely political, and its solutions are political in terms of effective measures to tackle disadvantage, exclusion and poverty. Regrettably, we have not seen many of those in the last ten years.

The witnesses' requests for new structures are very reasonable. The original idea when the task forces were set up in 1997 was that there was a national co-ordinating committee with very senior people on it, probably close to the most senior people in the relevant Departments, and that was operating within the Department of the Taoiseach. We also had senior people at local level as well. I have been a member of the drugs task force in Ballymun for a long time. I was also, for a period, on Mr. Hoey's task force in Finglas-Cabra. What happened very quickly is that those other agencies withdrew from the whole process and, basically, they did not want to know. The Chairman will be aware of this from his own experience; they really did not want to know. The concept of a health-led response is fine in theory, but it does give people in other Departments an out, as the witnesses have stated. I know from dealing with people at a senior level in government that most of them do not have a clue about how to address poverty and exclusion, or they do not want to know, and no effort is made. At various task force meetings, I often used to think that the thinking used to be that senior people will influence things, but actually the education was going the other way. The task forces were educating senior officials from different Departments regarding what the issues were and their solutions. In the main, they did not want to know.

What Ms Bairéad proposed regarding the establishment of a cross-departmental committee on drugs is very important. She said she thought it would sit under the Department of Health. In many ways, I think it should be in the Department of the Taoiseach, because the teeth of the Department of the Taoiseach are needed to get people to do their jobs, to perform and stop this tendency of just leaving it to the Department of Health. I also completely agree with the idea of having senior people locally. Apart from withdrawing from the local structures, what happened was that agencies sent along junior people who did not have any decision-making powers, and that has been the problem. What the witnesses are looking for in terms of the structures seems very reasonable - maybe overly reasonable. Can the witnesses talk to us about the engagement they have with the Department of Health and the Minister at the moment? Is there any functioning body that involves other agencies?