Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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Go raibh maith agaibh agus fáilte romhaibh anseo. I wish to follow on from what Deputy Gould said on the funding of the national drugs strategy. Although the costings are not available and a determination has to be made on the actions proposed by the citizens’ assembly, we can state quite categorically that the opposite side is very well funded. That does not look like it will change in the near future. The guests are dealing with this every day. We all know that what we want to see should be health led and trauma informed. Obviously, there should be collaboration because we are talking about a multiagency effort. One cannot but operate with the Department of Justice, the Garda and other bodies. We all know we could deal with an awful lot of this. As Deputy Gould said, we are sometimes talking about people who have been failed from the earliest stages of their lives. If we are not serious about early family and community interventions, we are destined to continue doing what we are doing.

This relates to what the Prison Service representatives said about the cohort of people it deals with who have other issues that have not been addressed. However, I accept that when dealing with the cohort in question and with addicts, there are issues that arise. In this regard, we all know how the drugs industry operates. As Deputy McAuliffe said, on one level drug taking is part of the issue but a major part is what has become the acceptable level of criminality. Even when relatively major street-level or estate-level dealers are dealt with, they can be replaced with a team of vulnerable people and individuals who are sometimes described as "useful idiots", to use a horrible term. Even a 50-year-old alcoholic, who may or may not take tablets, may have his house taken over to be utilised by drug dealers. In this case, people will be running to the house who are addicts themselves. It is incredibly difficult to put all the pieces together to take apart the criminality and deal with the people involved. It is never the main drug dealer who will call to your granny’s house and say you owe a drug debt; it will always be a cut-out or somebody along the line who owes money and is put under pressure to pay it.

That makes it very difficult to deal with - I do not think we are serious about any of this - although excellent work is being done. If even one person who can be saved from addiction or diverted from it, or if the State can be saved the cost of putting someone through the criminal justice system and prison, that is a win. However, no one is going to tell me that we have the funding and all those pathways.

What is the best thing we can do at this stage? We are talking about what is still a very small number of people going through these drug treatment courts. As I have stated previously, I accept that for some of those individuals , even if they are sent away just for three or four months, the people who live in close vicinity to them are happy with that, given that it might remove the issues they have to deal with. It is the wider tools we do not have as a society. It is everything from local authorities and the Garda to Tusla and other agencies. For all the collaborative work and all the complex case meetings that are held, I still end up in daft situations where I deal with the council or the Garda or sometimes with some idiot who is selling drugs out of his granny's house. That person might be just a dimwit drug dealer, but he or she causes great hassle for the people who live around the area.

I have not really asked a question but we are in a very bad place, down to the level of addiction. Anybody who goes to an emergency department will find there is a large cohort of people who are addicts or have mental health issues, some of which have been exacerbated by or resulted from drug use. We are not being serious about addressing this. That is not to take away from the work the witnesses are doing, but they know that even the likes of the regional drugs task forces are dealing with funding that is still lower than it was in 2008. We did not have the service to deal with the issues we had then, and even if we set aside tablets and everything else and look at cocaine alone, we definitely do not have it now.

If we are to be serious about this, what do the witnesses propose? We can talk in circles here, especially in my case. We all want to see decriminalisation and something novel, but we also want those criminal elements that have their foot on the neck of communities to be dealt with. There is the simplistic response of saying we want to go easy on these guys, but the people who say that have no proposal. It is not as though they are proposing street executions, for example, and I certainly am not either, but nobody is being serious about the overall, multifaceted approach we need. What do the witnesses’ organisations require to respond to the needs that face them? I appreciate that they are fed up of tackling this and seeing it go nowhere, and they are trying to deal with small aspects of the issue. There are many people doing great work and trying but the system is failing across the board.