Mr. Jim Doherty:

It has a broadly administrative function. I have no comment about the performance of individual civil servants or anything like that. It is not about that. It is about the fact that we need the structure in order to plan ahead and say we will have three meetings next year. We recently tried to restart housekeeping meetings to deal with administrative issues which have been arising. Deputy Shortall will remember the national drugs strategy team. Issues could be brought there and could be addressed there and people had decision-making capacity. What we find now is that it has become a lot more difficult to get people who are decision-makers to come into in a room with us in order for them to commit to a decision. I am sure it is a common problem across government.

In defence of the current of the group of people in the Department, they also have the added responsibility for refugees, inclusion and homelessness. These are all critical issues that feed into the drugs issue, as we mentioned in our statement. However, as the Deputy said, we were in the Department of the Taoiseach and had a Minister solely concerned with drugs, and now we are in the Department of Health and have a Minister who also has lots of other jobs. An inescapable conclusion of this is that the drugs issue is not being prioritised the way it used to be.