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.