Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 2 October 2025
Committee on Drugs Use
Community Supports: Discussion
2:00 am
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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Good morning, everyone. I am delighted to welcome everyone to the second public meeting of the Joint Committee on Drugs Use to discuss community supports. We have a wide range of guests and experts from across the field and we look forward to hearing their statements and testimony today. The item on the agenda is engagement on community supports.
Before we begin, I have to deliver a note on privilege. All witnesses and Members are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity by name or in such a way as to make him or her identifiable or otherwise engage in speech that might be regarded as damaging to the good name of the person or entity. Therefore, if statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, witnesses and Members will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative they comply with any such direction.
I remind Members of the constitutional requirement that in order to participate in public meetings, members must be physically present within the confines of the Leinster House complex. Members of the committee attending remotely must do so within the precincts of Leinster House. This is due to the constitutional requirement that in order to participate in public meetings, members must be physically present within the confines of the places where the Parliament has chosen to sit. In this regard, I ask any Member partaking via MS Teams that prior to making their contribution to the meeting that they confirm they are on the grounds of the Leinster House campus.
I welcome all our witnesses to begin engagement on our first module and second hearing in public session on community supports. All the opening statements have been circulated to members of the committee and will be published on the Oireachtas website after the session. As agreed, we will limit each opening statement to five minutes and hopefully this will allow for plenty of questions and answers. I will also say that members have not yet learned the art of bilocation so people will be coming and going as we progress.
I invite Mr. Fearghal Connolly to give his opening statement on behalf of the Donore Community Drug and Alcohol Team. I understand he is sharing his five minutes with Ms Cheryl Kelly. They are very welcome.
Mr. Fearghal Connolly:
I thank the Chair and the committee for the opportunity to present this submission to the Joint Committee on Drugs Use. For over two decades, we have worked at the heart of the Donore community, providing essential supports to individuals experiencing addiction and their families. Donore Avenue is in Dublin 8 and borders Cork Street, South Circular Road and Dolphin's Barn.
Our work is grounded in harm reduction, recovery support and family resilience. We seek to respond flexibly to changing patterns of drug and alcohol use while ensuring no individual or family faces these challenges alone. Our mission is to provide a comprehensive range of services that meet the needs of our community in an open, welcoming and non-judgmental environment. We support people in active addiction, people taking steps towards change, people sustaining long-term recovery and families and loved ones affected by drug use and alcohol misuse.
Services are delivered through one-to-one support, group programmes and community outreach. Alongside our core service delivery, we recognise the urgent need to provide targeted supports for young people impacted by substance use and families of people struggling with drug and alcohol difficulties. Over the coming three years, we are committed to expanding specialised interventions for these groups, building on our community focus and client-centred ethos. Drug and alcohol use has far-reaching effects. As we know, it impacts not only individuals but also their families and wider communities.
Our approach is non-judgmental and inclusive - we work with people regardless of their background or stage of substance use - as well as flexible and responsive. We adapt supports to meet individual needs. Our approach is holistic in addressing the physical, emotional and social well-being of our service users. Our services include low-threshold drop-in facilities; referrals, advice and advocacy; case management and key working; family support; daily programmes such as yoga, acupuncture and dynamic storytelling; and art therapy. I have named just some of the programmes we engage in. We also provide hot meals twice weekly.
In 2024, we supported 161 individuals, resulting in 5,029 service visits despite relocating to a temporary premises at 78B Donore Avenue after a fire in Donore Community Centre in 2021. This has still not been refurbished and we are waiting on the work to begin on that soon. We expect to be moving into that premises again in 2027.
We have our expanded digital presence through our website and new social media platforms, including Instagram. We provide one-to-one key working and solution-focused sessions to an increased number of service users. Last year, we launched the women’s crack cocaine programme, WCCP. This was a pilot project engaging 13 local women, funded through a one-off €16,000 social inclusion allocation in the HSE and some redirected funds through the task force.
We have strengthened referral pathways with partner organisations, including Dublin Simon detox, Coolmine, Rutland Centre, Merchants Quay Ireland, our local GPs and psychiatric services.
We have also distributed school kits to children before the school year recommences, 600 food hampers to families in need through FoodCloud and 1,600 hot meals were served in 2024. We also host AA and NA meetings several times per week for those who are in recovery, so they can continue their recovery.
Despite these achievements, the challenges in our community are escalating. We now see daily queues of people seeking crack cocaine in the Donore Avenue area. This is reminiscent of the heroin epidemic of the 1980s. Donore Avenue has experienced decades of neglect, with regeneration only beginning in recent years. Some 55 units have been completed on Margaret Kennedy Road, with a further 542 social and cost-rental units, through the Land Development Agency, LDA, due to be ready in 2027. A further 730 private units being developed by Hines on the old Player Wills and Bailey Gibson sites on South Circular Road, 10% of which we anticipate will be social housing.
The growing prevalence of crack cocaine and the increasing needs of local families underscore the urgency of sustained investment in community-based responses. The community youth centre is scheduled to reopen in 2027 and we require this to be a resource hub for the expanding Donore Avenue community, recruitment of at least two additional community development workers, the reintroduction of breakfast and homework clubs for young people, accessible youth activities for all young people and targeted outreach for young people engaged in harmful or antisocial behaviour.
Our strategic priorities are: securing long-term funding for the women’s crack cocaine programme, expand family and youth-focused interventions, deepen partnerships with statutory and community organisations and continue to deliver bespoke, person-centred responses.
The challenges in Donore Avenue are severe and growing. With the support of Government, statutory partners, and the wider community, we can continue to deliver vital services and continue to build a healthier, safer, and more empowered community in Donore Avenue. I will hand over to Ms Cheryl Kelly.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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There was only five minutes for the opening statement but I will get Ms Kelly in shortly, I promise.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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I invite Ms. Aoife Bairéad to give her opening remarks on behalf of the local drugs and alcohol task force.
Ms Aoife Bairéad:
I thank the Chair and members of the committee for inviting us. I am the chair of the Canal Communities Drug and Alcohol Task Force, and the chair of the Local Drugs and Alcohol Chairpersons Network.
We have a strong collaborative relationship with the Local Drug and Alcohol Task Force Co-ordinators Network, and I am joined by Mr. Jim Doherty, chair of the co-ordinators network.
Local drugs and alcohol task forces were established over 25 years ago to develop an effective response to the harmful impact of drug use in our communities across the country. Central to this initiative was the involvement of local communities in the development of the services they needed to deal with the problems created by drugs use. Since then, task forces have been at the forefront of innovation and development of these services, often leading the statutory services because of their more flexible and responsive nature, and their connections to the communities in which they are situated. We are often first to know and understand new challenges or risks that communities face and ensure that statutory and national services are made aware of these. We believe this foundation in the communities we represent remains our most vital strength, and if the recommendations of the citizens' assembly are to be pursued and be effective, task forces must have a central role in ensuring this success.
The citizens' assembly undertook extraordinary work and commitment to offer the Government a comprehensive plan to address the needs of individuals and communities impacted by drugs. We would also like to commend the members of the previous Oireachtas Joint Committee on Drugs Use on their recent interim report, which further strengthens this plan. We welcome the re-establishment of this committee under the present Government and look forward to collaborating with it to make the recommendations of these reports become a reality for the people and communities who have waited far too long for this reform.
Without key aspects such as the establishment of a coherent health-led approach to drug use, alcohol use and addiction, and the decriminalisation of drug use, our communities will continue to suffer significant and avoidable harm. The negative impacts of drug and alcohol use are systemic and complex. The assembly and the previous committee aptly named poverty, social exclusion and trauma as key contributors to the harm drugs and alcohol can create. Given this, the realignment of HSE regions that will distribute funding based on population, without consideration for other factors, will undermine the ability of task forces to resource the services adequately and equitably. This is at a time task forces have endured years of cuts and underfunding. During the period from 2010 to date, health expenditure has increased by 75% while task forces have seen their funding decrease by 4.5% and have seen their resources steadily reduced over the past ten years. This situation is incompatible with a continued leading role for task forces, and with task forces being able to implement either their obligations under the national drugs strategy or the recommendations of the citizens' assembly.
The work has been done to ensure that the future of drugs policy in Ireland can be established with the goal to not just reduce the harmful impact of drug use, but also to ensure that communities thrive and flourish, lessening the factors that lead to problematic drug use. Moving from policy to practice requires the commitment and collaboration of statutory, community and voluntary stakeholders. Vitally, it requires the voices of the people whose lives are most impacted by these experiences. While task forces are a critical part of the successful delivery of State-funded services in communities, we are also a means by which communities can hold the State accountable to them in ensuring their needs are met adequately and appropriately. There can be no real evaluation of service delivery and the successful impact of policy without us retaining this essential function. National, top-down approaches cannot, and will not, have the same impact as locally informed and locally driven service provision. It is a significant waste of resources and an inefficient way to ensure that the policies have the impact that they should. Similarly, funding that is distributed through national budgets and statutory agencies is not reaching task forces effectively, and sometimes not at all. It inhibits and at times prevents the timely, responsive services that are critical to the purpose and function of the task forces. Funding for task forces should be separate and direct, recognising the mandate and responsibility that we have to the State and to our communities.
Re-establishing proper, collaborative working relationships with State Departments is key to bringing these new policies to the table. The current national drugs strategy sought information sessions with various stakeholders, however, there has to date been no collaboration or co-ordination of local drugs and alcohol task forces and the Department to develop this strategy. This is extremely worrying, especially given the suggestion that alcohol would be removed from this remit. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how vulnerable people use drugs, including alcohol. Whether it is funded or not, or included or not, our services will meet people who rely on alcohol and drugs, alongside other strategies such as food and gambling. What does change if this work is funded and recognised is that we can ensure that the service people receive is as coherent and integrated as possible. This is the only way to offer services based on best practice. It is also the most effective and responsible way of using funding and resources as it reduces replication, ensures co-ordinated passage through services for service users and their families, and allows for a more considered and detailed evaluation of service delivery and effectiveness. Alcohol was added to the remit of the task forces without additional funding. This funding is essential to our ongoing work and efficacy within the reality of the lives of those who use our services.
As mentioned, task forces are often the first to respond to the changing or additional needs of communities. Ireland’s growing and ever more diverse population is changing how services can and should be delivered in this key area. Of particular concern is the lack of a coherent strategy for engagement with drugs and alcohol use among refugees and international protection-seekers, despite people presenting as being in urgent and immediate need of these services. There needs to be an immediate additional support for task force services, to ensure that we meet this need well, effectively, and with the appropriate unique supports to ensure that their engagement is safe and respectful.
If the Government is to be successful in meeting the goals of the national drugs strategy, the recommendations of the citizens' assembly and the more recent recommendations of the previous Oireachtas committee on drugs, a substantial change in approach and engagement will need to be introduced. It is important that the agenda of Government is not frustrated by the strategies of individual agencies, and we need to be seen as meaningful partners in this work. Given this we are proposing the following-----
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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I am sorry, Ms Bairéad is out of time.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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She was at a high tension point there but I promise there will be a lot of time for her to come back in and get to what she is proposing. Our next speaker is Mr. John Paul Collins who will give his opening statement on behalf of Pavee Point. I understand he is sharing his time with Ms Annmarie Sweeney. They are both very welcome.
Mr. John Paul Collins:
I thank the Chair and members of the committee. Pavee Point welcomes the opportunity to make a presentation today, and to highlight key issues relating to Travellers. As a drug and alcohol worker, I will highlight some issues and recommendations and then we will hear from Ms Annmarie Sweeney, a Traveller woman in recovery. Given the limited time today, we will focus specifically on Travellers but encourage the committee to include the Roma community in discussions, and we would be happy to present to the committee at a later stage.
The All-Ireland Traveller Health Study in 2010 reported that almost seven out of ten of Travellers considered drugs to be a problem within the community and this was for both men and women across all ages. The study also noted that drug abuse was understood as a major health threat to Travellers, particularly Traveller men. It was also noted the problem was getting worse and exacerbated by poor living conditions, poor educational outcomes and employment opportunities and racism and discrimination to the core. Fifteen years on, the situation has gotten worse. In my almost 30 years of working in this area, I can honestly say that there is not one Traveller family in this country who has not been touched in some way by drug addiction.
This is an issue for Traveller women, Traveller men and Traveller children, who are all witnessing what we can only describe as an epidemic. While we know this is an issue in the general population, the experience of Travellers is acutely felt and informed by systemic racism which creates the conditions for inequality of access, participation and outcomes as related to drug policy and services. There is a need for this to be urgently addressed at policy level and we welcome progress in relation to the next national drugs strategy. However, is important that in the development of the strategy, the Department of Health reflects on lessons from the previous strategy. It must be inclusive, evidence-based and properly resourced to address the disproportionate impact of addiction on Travellers and other marginalised groups.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of the devastating impact of addiction on Travellers, we continue to remain invisible in mainstream drug and alcohol policies. We are particularly concerned that the community sector, including Traveller organisations, has not been directly involved in or invited to be part of the overall steering group appointed to oversee the development of the new strategy. This is the first time in almost 30 years, to my knowledge, that this has happened and we see it as a backward step. How can the Department talk about co-design and partnership working when key stakeholders - those representing communities and who have a collective analysis and expertise - are not at the table? It is also very important to acknowledge some of the positive developments over the past number of years. In particular, the work of those in the drug and alcohol sector and the HSE is innovative, impactful and shows outcomes. These models should be further developed, resourced and mainstreamed.
We understand the committee is assessing the information from the citizens’ assembly and the previous interim report by the first committee to create a work programme. We want to reinforce the recommendations made to the previous committee and at the citizens' assembly. These are the full implementation and resourcing of the National Traveller Health Action Plan, which was launched in 2022, with increased core investment for Traveller organisations to support targeted measures related to substance misuse and addiction; ensuring meaningful and direct participation of the community sector, including Traveller organisations, in the national drugs strategy steering committee in line with the agreed policy, Values and Principles for Collaboration and Partnership: Working with the Community and Voluntary Sector; the prioritising and mainstreaming of Traveller and Roma health inequalities, including addiction, within the Department of Health and across the HSE into existing and forthcoming health policy and service developments; the provision of a social determinant of health response to addiction that is culturally appropriate in partnership with Traveller organisations, underpinned by a community development approach, including mandated anti-racism training, inclusive of anti-Traveller and anti-Roma racism, to all relevant agencies; and the implementation of ethnic equality monitoring, including a standardised ethnic identifier across all health administrative systems, including drugs services, to inform evidence-based policies and services and ensuring the reporting of disaggregated data based on ethnicity and gender at a minimum is part of the ongoing and annual reporting requirements set out by the Department and the HSE.
We believe that if these recommendations are put into action, key issues can be addressed and we will not be here at another Oireachtas committee rehashing the same old concerns. I will hand over to Ms Sweeney.
Ms Annmarie Sweeney:
I thank everyone for inviting me. I guess I am here with a bit of lived experience. I know we are on the clock. I have come through addiction. I suffered a lot of trauma and a lot of racism growing up in schools, other services and communities. I am here to be a voice, with Mr. Collins, for Pavee Point. Travellers need to be sitting at the table when decisions are getting made. Their voices need to be heard in order to break down the stigma and to build trust. I am now working with Coolmine on the outreach team for Travellers, which is the first of its kind. It is doing amazingly and I am glad to be a part of that. I am also glad to be a voice with Pavee Point to show the women who will come behind me there is a way out, but we all need to sit down together for all communities to make things fair and equal.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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I thank both Mr. Collins and Ms Sweeney very much. I will pass over to Ms Quigley.
Ms Anna Quigley:
I thank the Cathaoirleach and thank the committee for the invitation to speak. Citywide is a network of community organisations and activists that was set up in 1995 to campaign for a community development response to drugs, which is about involving the communities most affected by the drugs issue in developing and delivering the services and the policies to respond. Having started as a grassroots campaign, Citywide was invited in by the Government in 1996 and has been at the heart of the State’s response to drugs ever since. For well over a decade we experienced a genuine State commitment to community-led interagency partnership, while our experience in more recent years has been of a gradual and continuing decline of this commitment, to a point where it is no longer being implemented in practice.
We strongly agree with the statements at the previous Oireachtas committee by Paul Reid, chair of the citizens’ assembly, about the absolute urgency of the current situation and the lack of urgency in the response. What we have seen in recent years is a dismantling of the community-led partnership approach that energised our previous national drug strategies and a recentralisation of decision-making power back into the Department of Health and HSE. This results in the exclusion of our communities, including the families and the people who use drugs, from having a role to play in the policy decisions that have such a major impact on our lives. It is very starkly illustrated, as Mr. Collins has alluded to, by the direct exclusion of the three community networks from the national steering group. The three national community networks named in the current strategy as the national community representatives have been excluded. This, in our view, is an extraordinary sidelining and disrespecting of very extensive, hard-won and invaluable knowledge and experience that is crucial to the development and delivery of an effective national drugs strategy and it is not acceptable.
I will quickly highlight five key points which we think need to inform our next drugs strategy. They start with a social analysis. We need a social analysis so we know what exactly it is trying to address. The citizens’ assembly has recommended that drug misuse should be a policy priority, as part of an overall socioeconomic strategy. This is about looking at both the context and causes of drug-related harms. Obviously drugs have an impact across all levels of society. A significant majority of people who use drugs do not go on to develop an addiction. However, we know also the worst harms continue to affect the communities most affected by poverty and inequality. How we respond needs to be informed and shaped by these realities and not by moral judgment and stigma. One of the very clear messages from our social analysis is that there is no basis whatsoever for maintaining a policy of criminalising people who use drugs. This is reflected both in the recommendations of the citizens' assembly and in the current programme for Government and we need to move on it as an absolute matter of urgency.
On community development, our experience, and the evidence over many years, shows a community development approach is absolutely essential to effective drug policy. This is not just about the involvement of our communities in delivering services and activities; crucially it is about a role in decision-making and policymaking. In previous years, the role of the community reps - they are still working really hard to do it - on the local and regional task forces and on the national oversight committee very much reflected community development in action. It is crucial for the success of our next national drugs strategy that we look at how this community development process can be restored and revitalised. Again, the task forces have a crucial role to play in this. This will require resources to be allocated for local community development supports and networking at national and local levels. I strongly reiterate that there needs to be specific support and resources for the representatives of people who use drugs and of families, and also for the Traveller community, migrant and ethnic minority communities and the LGBTI+ community. We also need a much stronger voice for our young people. The first essential step is that we have got to be on that steering group.
Interagency partnerships are not just about turning up to committees, but about how work is done on a day-to-day basis. Again, in the past we could see that interagency approach developing really well, but a number of changes in recent years have led to a situation where the HSE has a dominant role in decision-making and allocation of funding and this has a negative impact on interagency working. This situation is mirrored at the national committee where the Department of Health and the HSE also play a dominant role and there has been a failure to invest in supporting interagency working. It is important to state clearly and acknowledge there are great people involved across all agencies and sectors, but everyone is being failed by the current systemic dysfunction.
On investment in services, we have to highlight, based on what we have done over 30 years and the experience in Portugal, that it is essential, as we move towards ending criminalisation, that we invest in a whole range of addiction services that are appropriate, but also in the related social services such as housing services, mental health services and employment supports. It is a positive for us in Ireland that we have the model of the community drug projects, because that in effect is what they have been set up to do. Yes, they can deal with the addiction, but they can also deal with and address all the other issues that impact on people's lives. We have a very good model but there are issues around how they would be able to continue their work given some of the performance measurement stuff that is coming down the tracks. We can pick up on that if we need to.
My final point is on structures for accountability. At the moment we do not have proper accountability for the delivery of the national drugs strategy.
We strongly support the citizens' assembly recommendation that implementation of the strategy needs to be led out by the Department of the Taoiseach working with a Cabinet subcommittee. Experience tells us we also need it to be supported and facilitated by something like the national drug strategy team, on which all the agencies and sectors were represented and which had somebody formally working as part of the committee. It is also crucial for the implementation of our drugs strategy that there is accountability for how effectively we are tackling the underlying causes of poverty and inequality. That means we need to re-establish some kind of independent and well-resourced combat poverty agency that can support us in doing this.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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Thank you, Ms Quigley, and thanks to all the contributors and witnesses. We move to members who each have seven minutes to make comments and ask questions. If members are asking questions, I ask that they leave time for answers.
Lynn Ruane (Independent)
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I apologise as I will have to leave the meeting for an emergency debate in the Seanad. I hope the witnesses know I support all their work. I hate to have to leave in the middle of a session.
It has been incredibly difficult over the past ten years to watch the erosion of community within the area of drug services, drug treatment provision and everything that entails. I remember, while in a previous role as chair of a task force, being quite startled by a comment made by an unelected official. Unfortunately, there are too many unelected officials gatekeeping in this area. The witnesses may resist saying that, but I can and will say it. The comment made was "We do not fund you for that". "That" was everything related to the reasons somebody might end up in addiction in the first place, whether it is substandard living conditions, proximity to violence in their community, intergenerational trauma or poverty or educational attainment, in other words, all the different things we, as service providers, know contribute to how somebody may respond to substance use or drug use in their community and how entrenched that may become in their lives. Much like Ms Sweeney mentioned regarding racism, we know all these areas are so interconnected to a person's experience of life and, therefore, their relationship to substance. That struck me because for the past ten or 15 years, we have seen a real effort to centralise drug services and provision as only being provided for the specific role of drug prevention without taking everything else into account. We are seeing that ideology - and it is part of an ideology - seep into all the other decisions being made. It involves keeping people out of the room and keeping task forces, Pavee Point, the Union for Improved Services, Communication and Education, UISCE, and family support groups off steering groups and out of decision-making. It is usually those who offer class analysis as a way of understanding that all those other conditions lead to the situations people are living in that are being excluded.
What is the importance of all the organisations I named being in that space? What impact is that having on people being able to do their job effectively? People have had to become activists and lobbyists to get into the room, rather than being activists for the people they are working with and their needs. They have been somewhat removed and they have to fight to be recognised for their role and the work they do in their communities. I ask for a comment on what the service providers feel is impacting their ability to be in the room or on the steering group in the first place. I also ask them to comment on the reference group, which feels tokenistic. Because the activists were not included, this reference group, which does not have all task forces on it, will be created. Actually, it may have representatives of the task forces in the Minister's constituency but not the Dublin task forces. I am open to correction on that. The reference group does not have the Dublin or other big urban areas task forces represented.
Is the reference group needed or does everybody who is supposed to be on the decision-making bodies need to be on the steering group? That is a wide question but I am trying to get to the heart of that. An effort was made many years ago to completely remove community from the strategy. They did not manage to remove the word "community", but they made a pretty good effort at removing community in the real sense of the word from the activity of the work. I ask for comments on that.
Ms Anna Quigley:
If we are in a room, we are well able to make our case. When we are in a room other people listen to us, as was the experience of the committee in the last national drugs strategy. Mr. McCabe was still with us at the time. The community representation, along with the other civil society representatives, had huge impacts on the outcomes because most of the people in the room, who were working in various positions in various agencies and bodies, were prepared to accept we were talking about real-life experience and that what we were talking about was what they needed to respond to. It is back to the idea that if you do not have analysis, you cannot know the question you are trying to answer. We can present a really clear position on that and we can present evidence based on experience. Everything we learned, we learned from experience on the ground. We did not learn it from anywhere else.
We have asked the Department to explain why we are not on the group, given that Citywide Drugs Crisis Campaign has been on every single committee since 1995 and is named along with FARI, Family Addiction Recovery Ireland, and UISCE, as the national representatives. We got an email back that did not address the question. We have gone back and asked again for an explanation. We know we will not get one because there is no reason for not having us there, apart from the fact that we will have a huge influence. We know that. Everyone here knows that wherever we go to speak about these issues, we have an influence because we are speaking about the real-life, on-the-ground experience. That is what we want to address.
We must set out clearly what the problems are. Moral judgment has come back into the approach to drugs. It is still rooted somewhere in the system that in some way it is people who are not strong and not able for things. The system will help them all right but there is an individualisation around it. The key point is that if we are in that room, we can win the argument. I have absolutely no worries about that whatsoever. We need to be in there. It will sort itself after that. We have to be in the room.
Mr. John Paul Collins:
This has been the approach taken by the Department in terms of excluding representation organisations. There is no question about it. Also, it is fundamental that we are part of that steering group and the development of that strategy because we represent the communities that are most affected by substance misuse. Ms Quigley is right. There is a fear because we bring the analysis to it. We challenge current thinking. It is a direct approach by the Department in terms of the exclusion of community organisations.
Lynn Ruane (Independent)
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Maybe we can invite the Minister for Health in to discuss the representation at another stage.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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That is an excellent suggestion. How do other members feel about it?
Lynn Ruane (Independent)
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I just wanted to get some action before I left the room.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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With the agreement of the members, we will invite the Minister for Health to the committee.
Ms Aoife Bairéad:
I want to make a broader comment on different forms of advocacy I have done over the years. I am not sure at what point the change in attitude happens as you go higher up, but what I see again and again is those in powerful positions, who are deciding strategies and budgets, having a strong wish for some of this to be simple and containable. One of the resistances to communities and community workers is that they highlight that there is demand on Government. This goes beyond the Departments of Health, housing, justice, social protection, education and children. I could keep going. This needs a systemic approach. There is a continual resistance and a wish to silo issues in a way that is not true to the lives of any person in Ireland, and particularly people who are vulnerable and in communities that have been left far too long without their basic needs being met, never mind the more enriching needs we would like to see met. I do not know why that is.
I understand why, when we ask about this in any of these forums, we are told we need the Department of the Taoiseach to lead it. I really wonder why people in those positions, Ministers and those in Departments, need their boss to tell them how to do this and why they would not wish to work together in this way. It really bothers me that this attitude continues and seems to be increasing rather than decreasing despite all of the research, the evaluations, the citizens' assemblies and other measures saying that these are systemic issues that have to be dealt with in a systemic way.
Nicole Ryan (Sinn Fein)
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I apologise; I was caught up in the Chamber but I read all of the opening statements prior to coming in here. My first question is for the Donore Community Drug and Alcohol Team. It was mentioned that domestic violence is a common factor for women in addiction. I have talked to a few services and one of the things they have told me, which I would have already known, is that when women try to leave a situation of domestic violence while in addiction, they often stay because they do not wish to go into homelessness services. They believe it is better to stay than to leave. What kind of interagency approach is needed? At one stage, there were 12-month beds in Dublin for women who were fleeing but they are now 12-week beds. What do we need to do? What kind of interagency approach is needed to look at domestic violence and addiction together?
Ms Cheryl Kelly:
It is very nuanced. Children may also be involved and if these women are not to be separated from those children, where do they go? Nine times out of ten, they just stay in the domestic violence situation due to fear. The statistics show that it takes a woman seven attempts before she actually leaves a domestic violence situation. I have done an awful lot of work with Ruhama around sexual exploitation because that is obviously part of domestic violence as well. There needs to be an awful lot more attention brought to the fact that this is a common issue. This is very common among the women I have worked with and supported who suffer from addiction or have addiction issues. It is a common theme and something I have had to educate myself about to support these women appropriately and to know what kinds of interventions I can put in place to do so. It is very difficult.
Nicole Ryan (Sinn Fein)
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What is the number one barrier? Is it the housing or the children?
Ms Cheryl Kelly:
It is housing and the fear of the unknown. It is going into a place not knowing what to expect. Sometimes, women fear that if they go somewhere as a single person or if their children are in care, they may end up in a single person's service that could be low threshold. They might not be interested in that. They might also know somebody who is already in the service and not want people to know their business or be afraid that somebody will tell their partner that they are in that service. We need more protective services for women where there is no risk of being seen and their ex-partner being let know where they are staying for the moment. It is about being welfare-based.
Ms Anna Quigley:
It is just another example of the importance of the community drug project level and the reluctance of agencies to work together on a whole range of issues like this. At the level of the community drug projects, people just go and do it anyway. I am thinking about the SAOL Project in particular. It is a programme for women in addiction but it has a specific programme around domestic violence because that has emerged as an issue. The project is piloting that on the ground. It is a really good example of the role of community-based projects. It takes the policy people and the people in the agencies a long time to realise they need to work together, if they ever do, but we are lucky to have that model of community drug projects at service delivery level that do not just deal with addiction but deal with whatever issues are going on in someone's life. That model is really crucial because it allows for that kind of interagency stuff which, as Ms Bairéad has said, is very difficult to get. I suggest it would be worth having the SAOL Project here so that the committee could hear more. It again proves that it is in that community-based model that you will get interagency co-operation happening in practice.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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I believe the SAOL Project is in with us next week.
Ms Cheryl Kelly:
I have been supporting women who have an addiction to crack cocaine in Donore since August 2024. We are really struggling to get funding for an evidence-based contingency management programme. I have written funding proposals and sent them to the powers that be but they have been refused. Contingency management is evidence-based and has been shown to reduce drug use in women. It offers real tangible incentives for people to reduce their drug intake, especially their use of cocaine and crack cocaine. However, we are finding it very difficult to receive funding. It is there and we are ready to go but there is no money to run the programme.
Nicole Ryan (Sinn Fein)
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My next question is for Pavee Point. Will the representatives expand a little bit on the peer-led Traveller recovery model?
Ms Annmarie Sweeney:
I have been a peer worker for a long time and I am now with the outreach team at Coolmine. I see at first hand the devastation caused by drugs in the community. Having that lived experience and knowledge behind you is a blessing because when you go out to your own community, they can relate to you differently because you have that experience, especially as a woman. That even applies to domestic violence and many other things I have experienced in life. It is very important to have role models in our communities to show that it can be done, that it is possible and that you are not alone.
Mr. John Paul Collins:
In terms of the resourcing element, it is really important that targeted initiatives are in place, particularly for communities that are harder to reach, including Travellers. It is really important to have targeted initiatives that lead into the mainstream rather than a segregated service. We have had enough segregated services over the years that destroyed the community, particularly in education. It is about targeted initiatives that lead into the mainstream and creating those pathways.
Nicole Ryan (Sinn Fein)
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I have one more really quick question. Is that programme with Coolmine being rolled out nationally? Is it accessible to everyone? There is a Traveller group in my constituency who have been doing a peer mediation programme for men to mediate between them but something like this would also be very useful to them.
Ms Aoife Bairéad:
To the Senator's point on domestic violence but also coming back to ours, this is why funding has to be offered locally in response to the communities themselves. I have a good example of what the Senator is asking about. This is not to dismiss the woman's experience but we had a man in our services who was seeking help for what he perceived as growing violence in himself towards his family. Groupwork was not possible because of a language barrier. Trying to find specific services and therapies for him took a lot of adapting on our part. That is so hard to do within the limitations of the budget. National approaches say that groupwork, drug-specific services or domestic violence-specific services are the answer but while all of those are necessary, the ability to move somebody like that man through services or help services to work alongside each other is the only way to find solutions. It is similar for any women who find themselves in that position. The more factors that are in play, the more difficult it is. I am a social worker as my day job so this takes up a lot of my working life. Although we talk about women in particular and especially parents, for anybody who is experiencing violence, the more factors that are at play and the more vulnerable that person is, the harder it is to leave and the harder it is to stay gone.
There could be children including young children, housing difficulties, poverty, drug use or mental health issues. Lots of women trying to access domestic violence services have all of those factors at play. We have to be able to support them in holistic ways if they are going to be protected.
Colm Burke (Cork North-Central, Fine Gael)
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I thank the witnesses for their presentations and the work they are doing in their local communities. I know that each and every one of them is very dedicated to the work that they do. Mr. Connolly from the Donore team talked about the rise of crack cocaine. What needs to be done immediately to get the message out there about the dangers and to give the necessary care and support to people who have a difficulty as a result of using it?
The number of people who have come in from abroad and the diverse population were mentioned. In Ireland, there is good family support, whereas if people from abroad run into difficult times, they will not have that same family support. That is going to be a huge challenge. If it is not a challenge now, it certainly will be in the next five to ten years. What do we need to do to deal with these new challenges that are coming?
Mr. Fearghal Connolly:
On how to put messaging out there for people, we have had fairly comprehensive educational programmes in schools to equip children with the knowledge around drug use, and that needs to continue. The real preventative strategy that we need, which is what is being talked about here this morning, relates to the infrastructure in a community like ours. It lacks a youth centre, young children's facilities and targeted outreach for young people. It has a youth centre that is lying empty. All of these things are contributing to a lack of will in a community like ours to get proper infrastructure, be it youth services or children's services.
At the moment, an increased number of young to middle-aged women are increasingly involved in the crack cocaine programme. It is a very specific one. Ms Kelly has been working with 13 of those women. We have a programme ready to be delivered but we cannot get the funding. This is the reality for community projects. The problem is getting worse, unfortunately, particularly in Donore Avenue, where we will have an expanding community. If we are not able to deal with what we have at the moment, which does not take many resources, with an increased population - possibly an additional 5,000 with these developments in the next couple of years - we will be back to facing an epidemic crisis like the one we faced in the eighties.
Colm Burke (Cork North-Central, Fine Gael)
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Rural communities in Ireland are very good at accessing funding for community infrastructure. When I was dealing with Merchant's Quay, one thing that came across was the lack of supports for community groups regarding how to source that funding.
Colm Burke (Cork North-Central, Fine Gael)
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I know, but what I am saying is that there is a need for expertise to give help to a lot of community groups. One of the things that is missing in some of the areas is that where they need funding, they do not have the necessary supports. They then have difficulty getting all the information they need in order to find where they should access that funding. That is one of the problems. It is a case of trying to give more assistance in that area. I am not sure if the Donore team has come across that problem.
Ms Cheryl Kelly:
No, in my experience of working in Donore, we have not had an issue with that. I want to comment on the Deputy's question about supporting people who might not have family supports in the country and what we can do. We will have to follow Sláintecare's plan and make sure that there are substantial and decent supports in the community for people who might have language barriers and drug addiction. It is another minority that do not have anybody to fall back on and they may not have the supports that an Irish person may have. They might not have parents, sisters, siblings, aunts, uncles and whoever it may be to support them in their journey of recovery. If you come to Ireland on your own and do not have that, who will you lean on? It is going to have to be the community. It is unfortunate that the majority of communities that have high drug use do not have community supports. We have absolutely nothing in Donore. Like Mr. Connolly said, we have no community centre or groups. There is very little in and around the area. The population in the area is going to increase within the next two years and there is very little in the area.
Ms Anna Quigley:
I would turn that issue right back onto the powers that be because this is a structural issue. As Mr. Connolly and Ms Kelly have said, the capacity to do the applications is there and they have a proposal ready to go. The structural decisions that have been made have reduced the role of the task forces and their independence in being able to allocate funding. When the task forces started, the way it worked was the task force developed an overall plan for its whole area, looking at all of the issues in an integrated approach, and that plan was submitted to the national committee. If it was approved, the budget was given to deliver the plan. That all went a long time ago. The HSE is now, in effect, in control of the budget and there is no ability at local level to be able to identify needs and say what should go where.
Crucially, it impacts on that issue of migrant communities and ethnic minority communities, because that is an issue we have done a lot of work on to identify their needs over the years. It is very clear that, again, that needs to happen at a local level. It is within the local communities that we can start that integration and involvement. The whole reason the task force structures were put in place was that there was a recognition that different communities have different priorities and that different responses are needed. Let us give us the communities the capacity to deliver. The task forces are still there, but their independence to make those decisions has been taken away from them. The question needs to be addressed from that perspective, as opposed to any issues that are with the people on the ground.
Colm Burke (Cork North-Central, Fine Gael)
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One other issue that was raised is the need for Departments to co-ordinate as regards assisting communities. Maybe the task force should be able to deal with that issue but I am not sure if that is happening. Groups have to deal with the HSE and Department of Health but in relation to other infrastructural support, is there co-ordination within Departments to give vital support within local communities?
Mr. Jim Doherty:
There has been a long-standing lack of participation from the Department of education. As we have flagged previously, anyone who is working with drugs in any capacity would immediately think of young people as being a group that is one of the most vulnerable and important to work with. While there are lots of people who work very well with local youth services and individual schools, there is a real lack of support from the Department of education to have an overall and consistent approach to working with young people. It is a glaring omission from the work of the task forces and from the real implementation work of the national drugs strategy. I understand that there is going to be an increased focus on prevention work this time in the strategy and we welcome that. The key player in prevention work has to be the Department of education and all the structures that go along with it. The Department of education should be occupying a similar role to the Department of Health in the national drugs strategy. Perhaps the Department of justice should too.
I have a point to make in response to the previous things that were said. The Department is relying on a resource allocation model these days. It is very important to note that, although it has always been there, since the last strategy in particular we have seen an entire class of new people becoming victims of drug use, namely, families being intimidated for drug-related debts.
There is a real risk that such families and statistics do not show up in the resource allocation model which is built much more on sociodemographic grounds. That is a critical, glaring omission that needs to be corrected.
Colm Burke (Cork North-Central, Fine Gael)
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I thank Mr. Doherty.
Máire Devine (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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I should say that I am a board member of the Donore Community Drug and Alcohol Team, so there is a bit of a bias there. It is obvious that the Dublin 8 area of the city, as with many inner city areas, has long faced deliberate neglect, with socioeconomic challenges that have left communities not feeling safe and bereft of security, housing, health, education and community centres. The Donore community centre was burnt down nearly five years ago. Notre Dame, which burned down at the same time, is now back functioning but Donore community centre remains a shell. It was the place of safety for many youths who would come in and attend the programmes that were offered.
Youth is really important. I am not sure how many other Deputies or Senators receive representations. However, the kids seem feral. They are roaming around. They have no experience of a community centre or breakfast club. They are from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. The regeneration of their complexes and areas has been paralysed and stymied. There is also the known impact of Covid-19. These kids are causing havoc around our cities and we have not got a handle on it. They are there to be picked off by drug dealers as runners and watchers and we are losing a generation of them. I am alarmed by that and we in the drug team are greatly alarmed by the antisocial behaviour and criminal behaviour young people are engaging in. We are losing that generation. That is a grim vista.
To go back to Ms Kelly on women using crack cocaine. The programme is unique. Only a few programmes in the country target women. Regarding cocaine use, we tend to think of it as just cocaine, a class 1a drug used as a recreational drug, but there are difficulties with it and it is addictive. Cocaine use has gone up by 450%, or whatever the figure might be, which is concerning. The niche drug, crack cocaine, is more damaging to women and older women in already devastated communities. I am surprised by the ages of the older women who are getting involved. Is that to do with any particular factors? Are they new to all of this or are they just surrounded by it all? Many of them live in fairly despairing circumstances, including domestic violence. Will the witnesses expand on that?
I apologise for being very local. In most inner city areas, in particular the south-west inner city, we have massive development, including massive apartment development, yet none of the infrastructure such as community centres, football pitches and sports is being provided. The Land Development Agency, LDA, and Hines indicate that at least 1,500 units will be available. If I multiply that by three or four, it means that in the region of 6,000 extra people will be plonked into the area in the next two years, with no community centre or facilities. We are working on that. We need to open our eyes and see what is going on. We need educational facilities, a hospital and the services that support a healthy, progressive and contented ease-of-life community. However, we do not seem to have that. Hopefully, we will be back in the old base soon.
How can we influence the funding, flexibility and independence that were there but have been taken away and provide the checks and balances that are absolutely required for public money? How can we influence it? Do we invite the HSE in and say this is not working and that it needs to listen and act?
Ms Cheryl Kelly:
I am consistently supporting eight women on a one-to-one basis with their crack cocaine use. One of the women I am supporting is pregnant. The majority of them are living in homeless services. Only three have their own homes and two are in domestic violence situations. They are living in pretty poor circumstances. Some of the women I am supporting still have custody of their children and are trying to navigate their crack cocaine use as well as trying to be mothers.
Women on drugs are the most vulnerable in our society. They are often cut off from services that are tailored to men and looking after the needs of men. If we are to continue to support women and children in our community and the Dublin 8 area, we are going to have to do an awful lot more interagency work. I have skills that other people may not have. We need people working together. We need to put money and infrastructure in place so that we as professionals are actually able to do our jobs. You feel like your hands are tied, especially when you are not able to get the funding you want to run a programme, which means you are not able to run that programme. It is really difficult, especially when faced with that consistently, time and again. You are pouring energy and resources into writing research proposals and trying to fight your case. It is very difficult to get the funding. Alongside that you are continuing to support the women.
As Ms Quigley said, this is nuanced work because you are not just supporting women with their crack cocaine use; you are supporting them with their housing issues and with responding to Tusla letters and gaining access to legal aid so that they are represented when they end up going into court, whatever the reason may be. You are supporting them at the courts as well. It is not as though we are just looking at the drug issue. That is not the full issue. You have to look at the person. There needs to be a holistic approach. If people are having issues with their kids, what supports are we able to put into place? What family supports can we use? If a family needs help in the morning, what can we do for the kids when mammy is at home but might not be feeling herself and the kids are running around getting into trouble, setting fire to trees or whatever it may be? That is where it all starts. It starts at home. We need to be able to help the family as a whole, look at the holistic picture and see where we are able to get the supports. That is the only way.
Ms Anna Quigley:
It is very frustrating because the things Ms Kelly talked about there, such as a more co-ordinated approach where we have all the different agencies working together and delivering all this, have been on the agenda for years. It is so frustrating because in the early days of the strategy we had that. We had all these Departments and agencies together on the national drug strategy team. There was an understanding of the idea of a parent Department. It was moved around various places. For example, the parent Department is now the Department of Health because that is where this strategy is sitting. Back then, the understanding of the parent Department was not that it would control the strategy, which seems to be the approach taken by the Department of Health. The thinking in that Department is that this is in its budget and therefore it decides what happens. The idea of the parent Department was that there would be an understanding that the role of the parent Department is to facilitate the engagement of all the other Departments that can play a role. We are told now we cannot do it that way in the Irish system because all the Departments are responsible for their own budgets. It was possible to do it at the time because there was political will. There was a major political crisis because Veronica Guerin was killed in a terrible incident. It was a major political priority then, so it was possible to have a committee where there was a parent Department that took on the responsibility of making sure everyone else was sitting at the table but did not feel the need to be in control and be the only one actually involved.
With the young people's facility services fund, which used to be a parent strategy to the drug strategy and was part of the prevention strategy, there was a direct connection. I mentioned Fergus McCabe. He was on the committee involved with the young people's facility services. It was the recognition of that idea that you have to have connections between them. You have to have that kind of extensive collaboration.
The reason it is so frustrating is knowing it can happen. We are told the Irish system does not work like that and it is very straight down the line. We cannot have accounting for funds across agencies. When there was political will to do that, it was there.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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Ms Bairéad wanted to make a comment.
Ms Aoife Bairéad:
I do not know when it was translated into task forces, in particular, being service providers as opposed to a participatory approach. It is difficult to evaluate services when funding is short-term, limited and may not continue. A service is given a certain budget for crack cocaine, for example, but not for a long-term piece of work. Services have to keep reapplying for funding. Doing any kind of long-term strategic planning for task forces, and being adaptable to the issues that arise in communities over the course of a short or long period of time, is really difficult when funding is year-to-year.
The way staff positions in task forces and community services are funded means we cannot offer permanency or pensions. There are many different challenges. From a public expenditure point of view, it makes no sense to me. We know that short-term and once-off funding models do not work. It means we are using funding for something we know we can do in the next year and hope it is somewhat effective rather than, as my colleague said, asking for funding for what we would see as more relevant. It is not a conversation or discussion, and is certainly not focused on the communities with which we work.
I refer to funding for heroin. Task forces and communities were already trying to deal with benzodiazepine. When funding came for crack cocaine, we already had crystal meth appearing. If we keep on waiting for funding to come through in that way, we will never be as responsive as we need to be. People on the ground attending to people one-to-one and sitting in front of them are those who know in that moment what the person is facing and needs. Unless we can provide a model that allows them to offer the immediate and long-term services and supports that a person needs, we will always be chasing our tail on these issues.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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Deputy Devine made a good suggestion to invite the HSE to come before the committee.
Máire Devine (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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We are banging our heads off the wall.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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We will do that alongside the Minister.
Evanne Ní Chuilinn (Fine Gael)
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I thank all of the witnesses for coming before the committee. I am glad Deputy Devine asked them to expand on the crack cocaine programme because I was conscious that the witnesses did not get to read their opening statements. Rest assured, we all read them. I might come back to them on that.
I want to pick up on a feeling I am getting from all of the witnesses. It does not make sense to me that those groups are not on the steering group, if this is solution focused. The reason we have Oireachtas committees is to try to come up with solutions. Regarding the comment from Ms Quigley, how can we help with overturning the decision and getting representative bodies onto the steering group? That is the starting point. The door may be shut, but has it been knocked on a few times?
Ms Anna Quigley:
As I said, the approach we will take for the next seven years to the drugs issue will be decided at that committee. Community networks and the task force should also be represented, which happened on previous occasions. If we are not there, then the issues we are talking about, the challenges and approaches needed and the knowledge on the ground will be missing.
We held an event a few weeks ago to mark our thirtieth anniversary. The Taoiseach did the opening address. It is hard to understand how he could be so positive about the role of Citywide going back over the years and clear about how crucial it is that we, along with the other networks, are involved into the future - we have a transcript and recording of the speech the Taoiseach made - and the Department of Health is aware of that because we sent it the transcript. We wrote to the Department and asked for an explanation. We pointed out that regardless of whatever reasoning it might have, it was extremely discourteous. Having been on these committees for the past however many years, similar to the task forces, we found out that the committee had been set up and we were not on it. A press release issued on a bank holiday weekend. We were not informed. There was no communication with us. The discourtesy and disrespect is one thing. We asked who in the Department made the decision, when it was made and the rationale behind it. It is very difficult for us to come back to the Department if it does not tell us the reasons used to decide to exclude us. We received a letter about a page and a half long which included a huge amount of information we already knew because it is in the public domain as it was in a press release. It did not answer the question. We wrote back and asked the Department to answer the question. We are awaiting that answer. It would be useful if the committee members could raise this issue. I cannot think of any good reasons why the Department might be able to present for its decision not to include us; we would say that. We are awaiting the response. Any representations or strong messages from the committee would speed up the response. As I said, I do not know anybody else who thinks community networks should not be included. I do not know anybody who would try to justify that position. The great thing about these committees is that they are cross-party. A cross-party message stating that it is the view of committee members that community networks should be on the committee and steering group would be crucial. I would say the same for the task forces.
Ms Aoife Bairéad:
It is not just the steering group; it is the ongoing engagement year-on-year. A very simple ask we have made before is for a schedule of meetings with the Department for the year for the chairs' network and details of the meetings with the Minister. It is about common courtesy.
Across the board, I am baffled as to why the Department would not want to hear from us. That is what I am worried about. Why has it been decided that this is not needed? Why is there a scatter gun approach of picking different groups from different communities rather than going to networks like Citywide, ourselves and Pavee Point which are national and are trying to bring shared groups of voices in very powerful ways? I do not know why the Department is not interested in or even considering hearing those voices. I genuinely do not understand it.
It is not just about the steering group. It is also about how we engage with the ongoing process, move through applications to the citizens assembly and into practice and move through the next national drugs strategy. All of those things require very basic forms of communication being established and respected.
Mr. Paul Collins:
It does not make sense. This has been the approach of the Department over the past ten years. There has been genuine exclusion of community organisations and representatives. To a certain degree, it makes the life of the Department easier because it can develop its content and structures within the strategy and implement it in the way it wants to without being challenged on it. There is a real worry about that aspect.
The reference group met for the first time last Thursday. I only found out the membership of the reference group last Monday by email. I forwarded the information to UISCE and Citywide. I mean no disrespect to the members of the committee, but it is a tokenistic structure in any format. A genuine response to substance abuse issues in a community requires us to be part of the national steering group in terms of the development of the strategy.
Evanne Ní Chuilinn (Fine Gael)
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I am conscious that we have nine months to write a report, which is too long to wait to request a very simple and common sense approach to an escalating problem that has many social and other tentacles. I am on two other committees. Other committees have written to various Ministers and Departments as a collective and made a request.
I suggest that at this point the committee make a request and if it lands, great. Senator Ruane suggested we should invite the Minister to come before the committee. The appropriate person to discuss this with in order to represent the views of the witnesses would be the Minister of State with responsibility for drug use. We had witnesses in last week and we will have more witnesses in next week and we hear all of the same messages. The key thing I am taking away from this is that it does not make sense that those voices are not on the steering groups. The Chair and the clerk might determine whether my suggestion is possible. I am very new to politics but I feel very strongly about all of this. If this is something we can do, I ask that we do it.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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I do not see any reason we cannot. We are tasked with delivering a report in nine months, and in order for that report to be as substantial and informative as it needs to be, we need continuous engagement with the Minister of State.
Evanne Ní Chuilinn (Fine Gael)
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We do not need to wait nine months to write the letter.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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We absolutely should not. We have already agreed that we will invite in the Minister of State. Following Senator Ní Chuilinn's suggestion, we will write to the Minister of State, outlining the concerns of the committee about the exclusion, if that is okay. It is important to have the Minister of State come before the committee and explain it to us so that we can put our own questions.
Evanne Ní Chuilinn (Fine Gael)
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I thank the Cathaoirleach. I really appreciate it.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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The HSE will be important in that as well.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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We want them all in. We will start with the Minister of State with responsibility for drug use and the HSE, and we will also invite in the Minister for Health. The Department of education will come before the committee for a separate session in October or November.
Tom Brabazon (Dublin Bay North, Fianna Fail)
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I apologise for having to step out of that meeting.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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That is grand. We understand.
Tom Brabazon (Dublin Bay North, Fianna Fail)
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I largely concur with what Senator Ní Chuilinn said. Mr. Connolly mentioned engaging with youths involved in antisocial behaviour. Will he expand on that? It is a huge and growing problem and I would like to hear more on it.
Mr. Fearghal Connolly:
It is easier to explain anecdotally by outlining our experience of how it happens due to specific young people causing the maximum number of problems in a community. There is a generic youth service that deals with young people and runs youth clubs, social education and so on, but there are specific young people in a community who come through very traumatic childhoods and they act that out in their teenage years. We ran the targeted response to young people, TRY, programme. It was very specific. It involved people who had come through a similar background and environment. A lot of them had come out of prison, educated themselves and got involved in youth work. Those young men and women then went out into the community to work with the sorts of young people I have described. Deputy Devine described them as feral, but I think we have an idea of the young people we are talking about. That programme had great success.
Again, this is anecdotal. It had been run through Sláintecare for two years and, unfortunately, the Department of justice came in and said it was being put back into mainstream youth work. That was a mistake because it got gobbled up with the rest of the generic youth work. We need to target specific programmes, such as the TRY programme, to work in communities and they should be allowed to do their work in that way, which is targeting the young people who are causing havoc in communities.
Tom Brabazon (Dublin Bay North, Fianna Fail)
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Is it Mr. Connolly's experience that people who are involved in this largely come from families with addiction issues themselves?
Tom Brabazon (Dublin Bay North, Fianna Fail)
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That is very interesting.
Ms Aoife Bairéad:
Our task force recently commissioned research to develop a strategy on public safety because of all the types of violence we see in our communities. The biggest issues coming up in the task force for young people were domestic violence and gang- and drug-related crime. That research is available and I can certainly send it to the committee if it is interested. It has very clear recommendations on how we might approach this. It shows that, as the Donore team representatives said, people who have lived that life and faced and overcome those challenges are probably best placed to be able to connect with young people and others in these situations by making them feel understood and getting the message across. We are going down a number of routes seeking funding to be able to move the pilot projects forward, in the hope that if they work for us, they will be adaptable to work elsewhere as well.
Tom Brabazon (Dublin Bay North, Fianna Fail)
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I would certainly welcome that.
Ms Annmarie Sweeney:
In the north inner city of Dublin, it is a common experience that some of the programmes working with young people in those situations are now working with the fourth generation of a family. There will have been a failure previous times. Some issues involve the linking-up between various Departments and agencies. There is a connection to the drugs trade and young people getting involved in it. It is a challenge at local level. When we speak about community, we always say it includes the families and people who use drugs. Something we learned from our earlier experience on the drugs issue is that in the past we fell into dividing people and we were turning on each other. We had to learn from that and say we will not do it again. That is a challenge for all of us. Some of what is happening is shocking for everybody.
An example I can give from the north inner city is work done through the Inner City Organisations Network, ICON, which looked at what is described as young people being groomed to become involved in the drugs trade. People can look at that and see the parents or families as being at fault. The work that was done is very much about highlighting the voice of families and parents, and mothers in particular, going through the experience to hear about the kind of support they need. We cannot look at young people without looking at the situation of the families and parents.
There is also the broader point about how these issues link into broader issues of how we develop our communities and our cities. I am speaking specifically about the north inner city and some of these groups of young men in particular. The north inner city, and the south inner city is probably the same, is not being developed in the interests of the communities living there. It is being developed in the interests of the city. We are getting all kinds of commercial rental housing and business units but it is not being developed in the interests of the people who live there, and in certain areas there is a response from the young men.
There are areas now that used to be public and have been privatised. A good example, which was covered by the media, was when young fellas started to jump into the canal near the docks and people in the nice cafés were being disturbed by it. It was said that these young people had to be stopped jumping in, even though their fathers and grandfathers had done it for years. They learned how to swim by getting thrown in and having to figure out what to do. Those groups of young men are now being told they cannot do this and their response is to say they are not to be told they cannot do it. They say it is their territory and they were there long before. It pushes them. I am not justifying any of that but there is a context to all of this. This is the broader picture and where interagency action comes in. It is as broad as the overall development of communities. Why do we not just build communities that are good to live in? It is challenging because there are a lot of levels to it.
Mr. Jim Doherty:
This highlights the overarching aspect of the drugs strategy and how it needs to involve many Departments together. The role of community gardaí has been degraded and reduced. In the district where I work, which is the K district, we are 90% down on the number of community gardaí we had ten years ago.
For young people in those areas, community gardaí are the first point of contact with the force. A good experience and contact with a garda who has been there a long time, knows the job and can form good relationships with young people can be the difference between a life of crime and getting a life back on the straight and narrow. It can really help with these kinds of public order issues. Again, this comes back to the idea that the Department of Health can mind the drugs strategy but there is a lot more to the drugs strategy than what the Department can do. Applying a Department of Health lens to everything that drugs task forces or drug agencies do will miss important parts of the picture, whether these are youth work, the gardaí, family support or, as I was talking about earlier, drug-related intimidation issues. There is not a feeling now that anybody is really taking account of this aspect.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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I thank Mr. Doherty. We come to me now, which is very exciting. I think all of us find the absence of community involvement on the steering group of the national drugs strategy incomprehensible. Can Ms Quigley or Mr. Collins tell us about their previous involvement? What did the oversight look like? What form did that work take? I ask them to tell us about the roles they have had during previous national drugs strategy oversight and steering committees.
Ms Anna Quigley:
I will start with what was the dream one now that I look back on it, although we had loads of issues at the time. I am going back to the national drugs strategy team in the 1990s. In 1996, Mr. Fergus McCabe was invited onto the team, which was set up to oversee the implementation of the strategy that came out of what was called the Rabbitte report. It was a committee that had representatives from all of the organisations. Again, this was clearly the case because the report, which was the basis of it, had set out that broader kind of socioeconomic context, as has been recommended here by the Citizens' Assembly on Drugs Use. This meant all the various agencies and players needed to be part of this national drugs strategy team. The crucial thing around it, though, was that it was recognised it is not just about having a committee. Again, this is because everybody knows that if there is a committee meeting once every couple of months, people come together, talk about things and a few actions are agreed and then everybody goes away. We always say that is not interagency working. What was different about the national drugs strategy team was that each member of it, whatever Department or agency they were from, spent half their working week on the work of that committee. It was a huge core part of their day-to-day work. It was not a case of going to the committee, listening, saying a few things and then going back. I do not mean that in a disrespectful way to people, but committees are often like that. For those people on the national drugs strategy team, though, it was an actual core part of their work. Those people were responsible within their agency for dealing with the drugs issue. This meant that when they went back into their day jobs, they were dealing with the drugs issue and were able to relate it to overall action.
I can think of a really good example, and then I will shut up. We talked earlier about the community drug projects and this is where they originated. All that time ago, the methadone programme was being expanded, which was a positive thing. When people are actively using drugs, they are very busy all the time because they are constantly having to be out there doing things. One of the things that became really noticeable when people went on methadone was that they went to the clinic once a day and had the rest of the day free. People from the community and the community drug project were looking at this and started to say we needed to be providing stuff, something worthwhile, for people to be doing during the day. It was actually the representative of FÁS, now the Department of Social Protection, at the time who said to everyone sitting around the committee table together that it had its community employment, CE, scheme and wondered whether it could be looked at to adapt it in some way because it would give people 20 hours a week with some options. This was the root of what are now community drug projects. People do not realise that half the funding, or could be even more but it is certainly a significant amount, coming to community drug projects is from the Department of Social Protection. This is the case in some of them but not in all of them. This is hugely important, while there is funding from the HSE for the addiction-related pieces, the funding from the Department is saying we also want to look at the future of people and their future opportunities around education and employment. Thankfully, this model has survived. It is about having more of those things. It is a real interagency committee when everybody is sitting there and thinking of what their agency can contribute. This is not the thinking at the moment.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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That was what the ideal committee looked like.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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What did the last one look like? When did it become different?
Mr. John Paul Collins:
On top of that, in terms of the national drugs strategy team, the first piece of national research on substance misuse in the Traveller community was in 2006. As Pavee Point, the national representative organisation, we sat down with the team at the time to talk about the recommendations that came from the research. Over 12 months, we developed an implementation plan for the recommendations that came out of the strategy. Unfortunately, then, the national drugs strategy team was pulled. The fundamental difference now is that collective community response just does not exist and has not existed for the past ten or 12 years in fairness. There was a time, a dreamtime I would also say, that we can compare with the structures we have now, which are ineffective.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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Who was making the decisions in advance? When you say agencies and decision-makers, who were these?
Ms Anna Quigley:
It would be the Department of Health and the HSE. They would be making the decisions. They might feed back to other people, but that is an entirely different thing to people being part of the decision-making. In effect, if the decision has been made, then we are just being informed of it.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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This is what people really need to know and understand because often this seems so big and complex and a behemoth. We also know there were ideals that we fell away from regarding addiction. It is about being able to understand the structures, and then we can get to understand who is excluded from them.
Turning to Ms Bairéad, I am surprised by how many people watch Oireachtas committee meetings. How would we explain to anyone watching this meeting what exactly a drugs task force is?
Ms Aoife Bairéad:
They came into existence, as has been said, after the Rabbitte report as well and were designed to try to bring community organisations into a position to address the harms of drugs in communities. There are regional drugs task forces as well. I am aware they are not here to speak for themselves, but by and large they operate in the same way. The drugs task forces were a way for community organisations to come together with statutory and voluntary agencies to try to ensure the services being provided and how they adapted or grew was built around a shared understanding of what the community needed.
Most drugs task forces have monthly meetings, chaired by an independent chair. We are all volunteers. They have a co-ordinator who ensures the day-to-day running and the moving of strategies and plans forward. They also bring groups together. Most drugs task forces have subgroups that will look at particular issues, and these might be concerned with young people, family support, treatment and recovery and those types of spaces. Within that, it was agreed task forces would have a budget to employ a certain number of people but also to fund projects and other pieces of work in their communities that would address the specific needs identified by those task forces. It was a community-based collaborative approach. Some of those funding mechanisms have become much more fixed and permanent. There are projects that are just funded year-on-year through the task force. As I said, some funding comes in that one-off or short-term way and some we apply for to expand or add to our services.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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I cut Ms Bairéad off earlier just as she was about to tell us how the drugs task forces could be better in terms of where we are now. When I say better, I mean how the drugs task forces can be better aided by the State in terms of the work they do. They already have an important role.
Ms Aoife Bairéad:
We need long-term funding that allows us to actually plan and support services and ourselves well. We must be able to compete with the HSE and other Departments in terms of staff. We want to be able to recruit the best people who can do those jobs who through their experience in life and work and education can come to that role and offer the best that the community deserves. Our funding, as I said when I outlined it, is so stark compared to the funding within health more broadly. Task forces are not unique in that. Many community services have experienced the same issues.
Given the cost of living, inflation, the cost of renting properties and all of the pieces that affect us, it is a huge task to try to keep our services running and, literally, to keep the lights on in some of our buildings. We asked for an analysis to be commissioned to look at the structural disadvantages that local task force areas face to inform the funding and resourcing of the proposed plans. Doing it based on the population simply will not meet the needs of the people we work with. These issues are not just faced by new communities; they are faced by communities that have been there for a very long time as well. The situation is complex and therefore the approach should be nuanced. I struggle with the idea that elegant siloed approaches to funding could somehow work with the complexities and realities of people's lives. It has never worked. I grew up in these areas. I have lived and worked in these areas. It seems impossible that we are still at this. We need to recognise the complexity of what we are actually doing.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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Before we have a second round of questions, I am conscious that I cut off the opening comments by Ms Kelly and Ms Sweeney. Is there anything they want to catch up on? Is there anything left they want to say?
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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Would Ms Kelly like to?
Ms Cheryl Kelly:
I thank the Cathaoirleach and members for the opportunity to speak today and for inviting me here today. My name is Cheryl. I am the facilitator for the women's crack cocaine programme provided by the Donore Community Drug and Alcohol Team. This organisation has worked in Dublin’s south inner city since the 1990s to support people, individuals and families affected by addiction. Every single day, we meet women who are living with the devastating impact of crack cocaine use. These women are among the most vulnerable in our community and often carry the weight of trauma, homelessness, unemployment and care-giving responsibilities.
Traditional services have often failed women and failed to meet their needs because they were designed without women’s realities in mind. In 2024, there were over 13,000 cases treated for problem drug use nationwide, which was the highest ever recorded. Cocaine has now overtaken all other substances as the most common main problem drug reported in treatment. Of particular concern is the surge in women affected. Between 2017 and 2024, the number of females seeking treatment for cocaine increased by 426%, rising from 284 individuals to 1,494. When we look specifically at crack cocaine, in 2024 there were 1,329 drug cases where crack cocaine was the main problem drug. Almost 46% of these cases were women, highlighting the growing gendered impact of this crisis. The median age of entry was 40 and most participants were facing severe socioeconomic challenges, with 82% unemployed, 21% homeless and nearly one in three reporting a history of injecting drug use. Crack cocaine use is rarely isolated as 63.5% of cases involve polydrug use, with opioids, benzodiazepines and cannabis the most common additional substances.
These national figures echo what we see in Donore every day. Since August 2024, the Donore Community Drug and Alcohol Team has piloted a dedicated women’s crack cocaine programme, employing a facilitator to engage directly with women in the south inner city. Already, eight women receive one-to-one support. Six of them are mothers, including one who is currently pregnant. Five are accessing homeless services and one is sleeping rough. Four have disclosed histories of domestic violence, with three still at risk of ongoing abuse. Alongside this, four additional women have begun engaging with the programme, and five more have connected through community outreach, many of whom have not engaged with any services. These women are among the most vulnerable in our community: they are mothers without stable homes, they are women cut off from mainstream services, and they are women at risk of harm from violent partners. Yet they have responded positively to outreach, relationship building and non-judgmental support.
The programme has already shown strong potential but it is clear that without sustainable funding the progress made will be lost. That is why we have sought funding for a pilot contingency management programme tailored specifically for women using crack cocaine in Dublin’s south inner city. This evidence-based approach provides positive reinforcement and real, tangible incentives for behaviours that support recovery. International evidence shows that contingency management is one of the most effective behavioural interventions for addiction. This programme goes further than abstinence alone. Its design is to address the wider social issues these women face, such as poor mental health, poverty and exclusion. It will strengthen interagency collaboration, linking participants with healthcare, child protection and social services. It will also amplify the voices of women themselves, building feedback and co-production into its design and delivery. This pilot programme will directly engage between 15 and 30 women, at least, in its first year, aiming for measurable reductions in drug use, improved health and well-being, stronger family relationships, and fewer women drawn into the criminal justice system. It represents not just an investment in recovery but an investment in stronger families, safer communities and a more compassionate Ireland.
Our current system is failing these women. Crack cocaine dependency, if left unsupported, compounds trauma and drives cycles of harm for individuals, families and communities. The cost of imprisonment, hospitalisation and crisis responses far outweighs the cost of prevention and tailored community-based support. Ireland has committed under the national drugs strategy and Sláintecare to community-based and evidence-led responses to addiction. The team's women’s crack cocaine programme aligns directly with that vision. It is innovative, responsive and urgently needed.
On behalf of the Donore Community Drug and Alcohol Team, I urge the committee to support this programme. The women we work with deserve more than stigma and exclusion. They deserve a pathway to recovery, dignity and hope.
Ms Annmarie Sweeney:
Mention has been made of domestic violence, addiction and services. I have been in and out of these services for many years, and I have been in the criminal justice system, which leads me to ask a question. Why do Traveller women in addiction not come forward, and what are the barriers and their fears? In a lot of services I have come across and in a lot of the programmes I have been in, both personally and professionally, I very rarely come across Traveller women. Last year, I was in the Dóchas Centre to give a speech as part of International Women's Day and there were 70 Traveller women from all over the country there. So it is not that they do not exist. I would be worried about their fears and concerns. They may feel they cannot come forward because of discrimination or they may have a fear of losing their kids. Mostly, Traveller women are seen as the backbone of the family and they do not come forward because they are afraid. There may be a fear of discrimination. So that means we are not getting them into mental health or domestic violence services. Traveller women face a lot of different barriers. This has been left out of the picture. Their voices are lost. You only have to step into the Dóchas Centre or any other women's prison to notice that they are there and they are just getting lost.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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It is time for a second round of questions. I call Deputy Devine.
Máire Devine (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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The Traveller community and Traveller women are marginalised. With addiction, there is no hierarchy. It is not a case of women versus men. The statistics are stark. The two commonalities are State neglect and poverty, which have a traumatic and unfathomable effect on all of the communities we have talked about here today.
I will make a few comments. It is great that people are trying. It is a pity that this has been lost in the bigger picture. Our witnesses are the experts by experience. They are the people on the ground who can drive programmes and be respected by the cool gang, especially when speaking to young kids. I think we just do not get our communities. This applies to whoever is working from the drawing board. I am sorry for being parochial but in the Liberties it seems the powers that be have decided that all we need are coffee shops and tourist accommodation.
Yet, the indigenous people, or whatever you want to call them, are either homeless or moving out to God knows where and different counties all over, which means communities are fractured. Gentrification is going to happen, but it is a case of how we marry the two aspects. Youths are running around now, as they were last year, gathering wood for the bonfire and they do not understand why we cannot have bonfires. I do not understand it either. Who in their right mind in the council – I will not mention which council – decided to give them a bulb instead of a bonfire? Let us instead introduce the youths to the community garda and fire chief and build a safe community bonfire. The bonfires cannot be all over the place, but they still will be because we have decided to give a bulb instead. We are just not getting it.
We are building and planning communities without community involvement. Young people have no place and no say in the regeneration of their complexes or areas. It is the same for Travellers. If the authorities do not respect areas and decide doing so is important, starting with the likes of maintaining windows, why should young people think they need to respect their area? I know a young girl of 14 whose bedroom window was smashed on the day she was born and she is still waiting for it to be fixed. Why would she then think she needs to respect her area? If you do not get respect from the authorities or the seniors, it is difficult. You need a good parent and good, steady security. We need to flip on its head what community means. I thank the witnesses. I am really passionate about this. We are failing.
Nicole Ryan (Sinn Fein)
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I am going to pick up on a few points. Filling out forms is not the issue, to be honest. Everybody who works in this space and anybody who works with communities knows how to fill out a form. Let us call a spade a spade: it is a matter of the funding. The money spent on addressing drugs is the issue, not filling out applications.
I am delighted with the remark about the Department of education. I am biased but I believe it has been getting off scot-free for decades without taking any responsibility for prevention among younger people. The young are the next generation. They are wise to everything and know more than we think, but they are naïve at the same time. I cannot wait to have the Department of education officials in here.
The witnesses might know the answer to this question. It a general one on rural Ireland. My area is rural and there is still a traditional attitude, so people do not talk about drugs and they say drug-taking does not happen in their families. We brush it under the rug. There are no services in my area; you have to go to the city. Travel is an issue. People with disabilities or people who do not have access to transport are just left to rot away in addiction a lot of the time. Have the witnesses seen an increase in the number of people in rural areas looking for help? What is the solution? If community services are not really available in rural areas and are concentrated in the cities, are people just falling through the cracks even more? They are almost hard to reach at this point. This is huge.
Ms Anna Quigley:
Just before Covid, we did work on the drugs issue in rural areas and talked to community people involved. It was interesting in that there were similarities and differences. The similarity identified was that even within rural areas, the poorest were most likely to have difficulties. However, what emerged really strongly were the stigma and shame in rural areas. There was a big issue in that services simply were not available in the first place. I should have started with that. The services were extremely limited. Some of the regional task forces were trying to deliver services but obviously they were in the major towns. Therefore, the services were not available. Community representatives were aware of people who had an issue with stigma. They said the stigma attached to those identified as involved in drugs in rural areas was absolutely massive. The issue of stigma, which has been referred to here in many different ways, is something we just have to tackle. If any message can come out, it is that using drugs is a normal part of life. Irish people do it. This evening, we can go to the pub and have a drink and that is not seen as abnormal behaviour or suggestive of there being something wrong with us. It is frustrating because there is a huge disconnect between that and how drug use is presented in the general media and in the area of entertainment. It is all about bad people doing bad things. Those we encountered in our work identified the extent of the stigmatisation, which makes it incredibly difficult for people to come forward.
There was a sense, although we are still following this up, that Covid presented an opportunity in one way because the projects in rural areas and towns had to move online, as everyone did. That allowed some people to make contact who never would have come in personally. It was interesting that Covid presented this opportunity. Obviously, what can be done online is limited because contact has to be made. There is a sense that we can find a way of reaching out or at least let people know what is available, but there is still the barrier of stigma. One point made was about getting the information to people. Those concerned stated people have no idea there are services available. The online element is very positive but the stigma is absolutely an issue.
Politicians say all the time that although they know there are serious drug issues in housing estates and small towns, these are never brought up when they knock on people’s doors because there is such a sense of shame. It is heartbreaking. Regardless of the next drugs strategy, we have to have some way, through a national campaign or something else, to shift the narrative such that drug use will not be something to be ashamed of. The stigma is very deep rooted.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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Senator Costello, who is online, has some questions.
Teresa Costello (Fianna Fail)
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I apologise for logging in late.
I was in communication with councillors around the country and some had questions they want me to ask here. Councillor Mike Cubbard from Galway, having attended a recovery-group event, said there is a lack of recovery homes in the Galway area. He asked whether there is a plan to create more recovery homes to stop the revolving door from prison to the streets and back into addiction. He requested more support for people. Councillor Christy Burke mentioned the need for more funding for rehab centres and additional detox beds to help people get out of addiction. He works very closely with people in addiction and sees it from day to day. I have had contact from Mayo councillors who said it feels like a big issue in every rural town and village. They said hospital waiting lists have spiralled out of control and that assistance needs to be more targeted.
Ms Aoife Bairéad:
It comes back to integrated supports. We definitely need more residential beds, but it is a question of bed type and the time for which people’s lives allow them to be in recovery or a treatment centre. People should have a choice. At the moment, there is extremely little choice. If you are lucky enough to get a bed, you take the one available, not necessarily the one suited to your needs.
I highlighted here and in other spaces before that for people who use drugs and alcohol in harmful ways but who do not have other complexities or challenges, drug or alcohol treatment and residential treatment tend to work very well. People who go to the Rutland Centre, for example, engage in AA afterwards, and that is often enough to keep them abstaining from drugs and-or alcohol and allow them to return to their lives. However, people with multiple traumas, other vulnerabilities, experiences such as racism and poverty, or mental health difficulties, which may entail a dual diagnosis, are far less likely to remain in recovery. They are more vulnerable to relapse. We have not built a system good enough to recognise that.
People need care that is immediate and available today, regardless of whether they continue to use drugs. They need a system of support that allows them to become ready in the many ways that treatment requires of them – physically, mentally, emotionally and familially. We need adequate step-down care that examines not only a person’s recovery but also the life they need to build for it to be meaningful.
In my day job as a social worker specialising in trauma, I note that one of the most important parts of recovery is people finding meaning in life, the things that make it valuable again and give a sense of importance, including relationships, jobs, education, sports and other activities. We do not have a system that allows for that through-care approach. This means we cannot evaluate our systems in any meaningful way. We cannot examine them fully. A day centre or drop-in centre will come across in a certain way but only in isolation. The people I know through my work who have recovered, whether from mental health issues, drug use or other difficulties, required many small steps before they could take a big one, whether that was going to treatment or engaging with mental health services. All those moments or small interactions with individuals, communities, teachers or coaches were what led them to feel strong and capable enough of taking the big step. Again, we do not recognise that enough. We have not built a system that recognises that the small steps are what make people resilient and strong enough to enter recovery or engage in treatment in the longer term.
Rural communities rely a lot on volunteer groups like the AA or NA for treatment recovery. In the community, it is the GAA and other organisations. We have not invested in rural communities to resource people to live full and healthy lives, whether in relation to mental health, addiction or otherwise.
Mr. Jim Doherty:
I just want to add a couple of issues. One of these, touched on by Ms Bairéad and others, is mental health. In my 25 years working with drug users in various roles, mental health problems are what drive much of the drug use. Some people feel drug use can lead to mental health problems. That can happen, of course, but it has not been overwhelmingly my experience. My overwhelming experience has been of people trying to medicate themselves for things already wrong in their lives, emotions and how they feel about their lives. Yet, time after time we develop these national drug strategies in the absence of mental health services. There seems to be almost no conversation between the two. Drugs projects end up working with significantly mentally ill people, often with quite serious diagnoses, without any great training, experience or qualifications and generally with very little support from local mental health services. We work with the individuals because they are using drugs. The mental health services, on the other hand, seem to take the view that once someone stops using drugs, they can then engage with them. It is rather like saying to a man with a crutch that you will work with him on the fourth floor but that he has to throw away the crutch first. Surely mental health services should be intrinsically involved in drug services and there should be regular conversation and considerable consultation, because the two issues are so interlinked. It is a matter of great dismay to everyone working in the area that they do not have that support.
Ms Anna Quigley:
On the issue the councillor raised about recovery housing, which I think was the phrase used, we know that the Portuguese, when introducing decriminalisation, introduced a policy on providing both employment and housing supports. They recognised that if someone is in insecure housing or homeless, recovery will be much difficult. They shifted investment towards those supports and that proved to be a very successful approach. However, they are very honest about the fact that currently in Portugal, as in Ireland, there is a housing crisis and that this makes it much more difficult to introduce such a policy. The principle makes complete sense. Being in treatment or trying to deal with issues while homeless is clearly impossible. The experience in Portugal absolutely points to a model but the Portuguese are saying now that it presents a big challenge in the middle of a housing crisis. That is part of the reality but it does not mean the model should not be considered.
I wanted to pick up on another point but my mind has gone blank and I cannot remember what it was.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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We are over two and a half hours in now.
Mr. Jim Doherty:
May I say something? I was asked to raise the issue of nitrous oxide, which is very serious. It is legal to supply and sell it and it is causing great harm in communities. You have only to walk around any community to see canisters everywhere. It is being widely abused, particularly by young people, many of whom drive under its influence. That seems to be part of the use pattern. This needs to be considered seriously by both the Departments of health and justice as a matter of priority.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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We can incorporate that into our work. Unless the members have other questions, I will bring the session to a close.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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We were waiting.
Ms Anna Quigley:
It would annoy me if I did not remember what it was. Mr. Doherty referred to the mental health issue. Back in 1997 – this shows how old we are – a senior person in what was then the Eastern Health Board, now part of the HSE, said one of his biggest challenges as manager of addiction services was to get psychiatrists in the general mental health service to work with psychiatrists in addiction services. Maybe the committee can look into whether that issue has ever been addressed. We continue to hear it has not. It inexplicable that dual diagnosis services have not been rolled out. We know there have been pilots but the crucial need for dual diagnosis has remained an issue for the past 30 years. The difficulty between general psychiatry and addiction psychiatry keeps arising. There must be stigma issues or others playing a part somewhere.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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We will follow it up in another session, bringing in some witnesses from the sector. If anyone wishes to make a last point, he or she may do so.
Ms Aoife Bairéad:
I reiterate, in light of the point made on nitrous oxide, my point on funding. I am not sure whether people understand that while short-term funding allocated for all the task forces to apply for, such as half a million, can sometimes sound like an extraordinary amount, it can be for a specific, narrow piece of work. A huge amount of time goes into the application process, but when the amount is divided, you find it is not a lot for any one task force to use and a task force gets it only once. We might use the funding for a short-term education project but we will always be on the back foot.
People have been using substances to make themselves feel happy, sad, relaxed or sleepy for as long as people have existed, so we are not going to get ahead of that. In the main, users are fine and do not cause any harm to themselves or anyone else.
The people that we work with, and the people who often come to the attention of newspapers and other platforms, are where it is harmful and dangerous. When we look at what has happened in their lives, we can see those patterns of harm, which are called adverse community experiences and they are much broader than just personal traumas and they often have them as well. That is why we might see mental health and other routes that they would take, including eating disorders, gambling and other places. As long as we build a system that wants to treat the drug or the problem rather than the person then we will keep running into difficulties and, again, we will always be trying to catch up.
Slightly separate, in terms of the question about task force and representation, the task force monthly meetings that I spoke about are supposed to be statutory, voluntary and community together. In terms of ours, and it is not just ours, because of staffing issues in the HSE, there are issues with having community representatives given they do not have people to fulfil that role. We have been without somebody since the end of 2024, which is ten months. That is not down to the local HSE area staff not fighting really hard and trying really hard. We have a really good relationship with them. However, by not having that person there month on month, we are losing again. There is a lack of communication and the situation makes communication difficult. I am not criticising the staff in our HSE area, with whom we have a really good relationship, but there simply are not resources in this area to do the work that has to be done, and that goes for all statutory agencies. We have been trying to get Tusla staff to join and we have been told they cannot be released because they are too busy. It is the same with primary care. Staff are being told they do not have the time, or they are not being given the time, to sit on task forces to address these key issues. With mental health, for example, it is wrong to not have primary care psychotherapy or psychiatry as part of release or probation. Because the statutory agencies are overwhelmed, they cannot release their staff to be part of these really central discussions that would then, maybe, feed into the Department in easier and healthier ways.
Finally, again on the lack of communication, when the WRC case happened and now that the pensions are coming in, when we had questions, the HSE staff said that this was with a private company so they could not answer and it was very hard for us to get through to them. When our energy should be spent on attending to, listening to and responding to the needs of our communities, a lot of our time is spent trying to firefight communication, funding, budget and resourcing issues. That is always part of community work but it feels beyond what is necessary at the moment a lot of the time.
Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)
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I thank the witnesses for their expertise and for helping to inform us. The committee was tasked with doing a job following on from the recommendations of the citizens assembly and the previous Oireachtas committee. They are expert witnesses and the fact they have given us their time will help our work a lot. As always, if there is anything we can do - and most of us are reasonably accessible - please let us know how we can help. The committee is adjourned until 9 October when we will discuss kinship care.