Ms Anita Harris:

In terms of how we talk about families and children, we need to accept the reality that there are no services. As I said, there are two mothers and children - you could count them on one hand - coming into base services that actually provide services for mothers with their children. There is zero for fathers. Even that in itself shows it; there is absolutely nothing in existence for fathers with their children. We have a fantastic national drug rehabilitation framework that actually outlines and explains that four-tier model of care. We cannot integrate what is not there. Unfortunately, many mothers are fully hidden.

We talked about stigma earlier and we need to acknowledge it in policy. We think stigma and addiction is bad. For a woman, it is even worse and if you add pregnancy and motherhood to that, it actually compounds. We wonder why people remain hidden because even if they were not hidden, there is no service that exists to provide that service. There is a big group of people we are not thinking of here; children have their own needs. We may have some services that provide childcare separately for the child but there is no overlap with the service that is provided for the parent. There are two people who are treated very differently and there is absolutely no overlap. There are wonderful parenting programmes. One of them is the Parents Under Pressure programme that is delivered. Most of these programmes are geographical. If there is a really active CHO area, it will fund a very specific programme. It could be specified to Dublin north only. It cannot serve people in Dublin south because it is not within their funding.

We have programmes like the Parents Under Pressure that recognises there are parents living in the community who just need support. They need wrap-around supports. I have worked with women for my whole career. Addiction is the least of our problems. When they come in, we look at substance use and say no wonder they are using substances. There is domestic violence, homelessness and trauma. We cannot ignore that.