Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 25 September 2025
Committee on Drugs Use
Family Supports: Discussion
2:00 am
Nicole Ryan (Sinn Fein)
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My question is open to everyone and is around tokenism the national drug strategy. I worked in drug services which were "nice" - they were the standard drug services - and nothing could have prepared me for working in a low-threshold, homeless service and how different that was. I was working with groups who were migrants or from the Traveller community and seeing the shift of how the gardaí and services outside of that would treat them. We were not saying that we had input from all types of groups and stuff like that but sometimes groups like that are almost a token, box-ticking thing to say, "Right, we have talked to them, that is grand, that is covered." How, in the national drug strategy and even in our own work and what informs us, could we ensure it is not just tokenism and that there is governance around that and that their lived experiences are embedded into this?