Ms Aoife Bairéad:

I reiterate, in light of the point made on nitrous oxide, my point on funding. I am not sure whether people understand that while short-term funding allocated for all the task forces to apply for, such as half a million, can sometimes sound like an extraordinary amount, it can be for a specific, narrow piece of work. A huge amount of time goes into the application process, but when the amount is divided, you find it is not a lot for any one task force to use and a task force gets it only once. We might use the funding for a short-term education project but we will always be on the back foot.

People have been using substances to make themselves feel happy, sad, relaxed or sleepy for as long as people have existed, so we are not going to get ahead of that. In the main, users are fine and do not cause any harm to themselves or anyone else.

The people that we work with, and the people who often come to the attention of newspapers and other platforms, are where it is harmful and dangerous. When we look at what has happened in their lives, we can see those patterns of harm, which are called adverse community experiences and they are much broader than just personal traumas and they often have them as well. That is why we might see mental health and other routes that they would take, including eating disorders, gambling and other places. As long as we build a system that wants to treat the drug or the problem rather than the person then we will keep running into difficulties and, again, we will always be trying to catch up.

Slightly separate, in terms of the question about task force and representation, the task force monthly meetings that I spoke about are supposed to be statutory, voluntary and community together. In terms of ours, and it is not just ours, because of staffing issues in the HSE, there are issues with having community representatives given they do not have people to fulfil that role. We have been without somebody since the end of 2024, which is ten months. That is not down to the local HSE area staff not fighting really hard and trying really hard. We have a really good relationship with them. However, by not having that person there month on month, we are losing again. There is a lack of communication and the situation makes communication difficult. I am not criticising the staff in our HSE area, with whom we have a really good relationship, but there simply are not resources in this area to do the work that has to be done, and that goes for all statutory agencies. We have been trying to get Tusla staff to join and we have been told they cannot be released because they are too busy. It is the same with primary care. Staff are being told they do not have the time, or they are not being given the time, to sit on task forces to address these key issues. With mental health, for example, it is wrong to not have primary care psychotherapy or psychiatry as part of release or probation. Because the statutory agencies are overwhelmed, they cannot release their staff to be part of these really central discussions that would then, maybe, feed into the Department in easier and healthier ways.

Finally, again on the lack of communication, when the WRC case happened and now that the pensions are coming in, when we had questions, the HSE staff said that this was with a private company so they could not answer and it was very hard for us to get through to them. When our energy should be spent on attending to, listening to and responding to the needs of our communities, a lot of our time is spent trying to firefight communication, funding, budget and resourcing issues. That is always part of community work but it feels beyond what is necessary at the moment a lot of the time.