Mary Fitzpatrick (Fianna Fail)
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I thank the witnesses for being here today and for all the work they have done to get us this far. The citizens' assembly has done incredible work. This is an incredibly important issue for us as an Oireachtas committee and for society more generally. When you see the statistics that 20% of our young people use drugs, that Ireland has the second highest rate of MDMA use, and when we see the carnage this is wreaking in our communities, we as an Oireachtas committee have a very serious responsibility to build on the work the citizens' assembly undertook. I sincerely thank the assembly for that piece of work. It is long overdue and we have to move forward. It would be completely unacceptable and negligent of us not to respond comprehensively to the recommendations. The fact there are 36 recommendations indicates the enormousness of the task. There is no point in us doing this piecemeal. It has to be comprehensive and holistic. The citizens' assembly, rightly I think, took a person-centred, victim-first and health-led approach to its workings. The recommendations all reflect that.

When I read all the documents, the depressing part was the enormous amount of effort that has already gone in, which I acknowledge, by people who work in this space, such as those in our health service, the drugs task forces, community services, An Garda Síochána and others who work with victims of drugs, the addicts, their families and their communities. It is really depressing to think we are this far on, with the hundreds of millions of euro that are being spent and the human effort that is going into trying to defeat this. I approach our task with real caution and concern. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we have as an Oireachtas committee to get this right. It will require very strong recommendations, and those recommendations will have to have not just an all-of-government but an all-of-State approach to it. They will have to be recommendations we can get communities throughout the country to buy into voluntarily and then all of the State's resources applied to making them happen.

I have a lot of questions and I have only a couple of minutes. As these meetings progress, we will come back and forth, so we would appreciate if we can come back to the assembly, even offline, with questions and queries. That would be very useful. In making our recommendations, our guiding principle has to be to try to do no more harm than is already being done and to enhance the potential for drug reduction, damage reduction, the increase of recovery and to support communities and individuals to recover, rehabilitate and be stronger and more resilient.

We will deal with the whole health side of it at another meeting. For my understanding, how did the assembly set the agenda for its meetings? How were topics determined? Were they determined by the assembly? Will the witnesses explain that to me?