Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)
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Unfortunately, I am not a member of this committee. I am subbing for a colleague of mine who cannot make it. I am a TD for Limerick City. I am a member of the local mid-west region drug and alcohol task force. I have been for 12 years, at this stage.

I do not have to tell anybody here, but Limerick city has unique problems with drugs. While drugs are an issue across the State, the use of crack cocaine in Limerick is probably off the scale. It is not seen in many places across the country. It did not happen by accident. It was designed. It was marketed by a drugs gang. They carefully did what they were doing and hooked a huge number of vulnerable people onto crack cocaine. People come from all over the State to buy crack in Limerick because it is the cheapest place to get it. One can see that when one looks at the bus and train stations. People are arriving in, buying the crack and coming out. The Garda Síochána will tell you this. People in the services will tell you this. I know this from dealing with some of the most disadvantaged areas. There is one particular area where it is concentrated in. The Garda has done a good job, as best it can, but there are 24-7 crack houses going non-stop selling drugs there.

The two submissions the witnesses made in their opening statements are excellent. I commend both organisations on providing them. It is good to see in black and white their commitments in what they are saying and that we need a change.

It is no surprise to me that the GPs' submission sets out that we have the highest death rate in the EU. One hundred and forty-seven people died from drug overdose in 2020. This excludes accidents, violence or whatever, and, unfortunately, suicide. God knows how many people died from drug-related suicides. If I go back to the figure of 147, it is double the number of people who died on the roads in the same year. We do not treat it with the same seriousness and we do not put the resources in there.

There is a lot of good work being done by a lot of organisations but it is just not funded enough. There are not enough people there. Waiting lists are horrendous. For instance, in Limerick, we are finally getting around to providing a dual-diagnosis programme properly whereby the task force is launching its own programme next week under its strategic review.

What concerns would the witnesses have if we moved to decriminalisation immediately? What resources would they need to make sure we can address those or whatever?

For the GPs, could the witnesses give us an idea of whether they have concerns that some of their GPs would not be aware of drug issues and would not deal with them, or would turn people away from that sort of stuff? My question for the IPU is this: do they have any statistics setting out how many of its places would have needle exchanges? Are there any statistics on that? Those are basically my questions for the moment.