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.