Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin North Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputies Joe Costello and Maureen O'Sullivan for raising this issue. This morning I accompanied Mr. Tony Duffin and other members of the Ana Liffey Drug Project on a walk through the streets north and south of the River Liffey for an hour and a half.

What I came across was particularly shocking. I saw drug paraphernalia, human excrement, the result of a drug user's withdrawal symptoms, blood and various other types of drug litter. What I witnessed today is still very much playing on my mind. I had been on a walk-around previously with Mr. Duffin and was very much taken aback then. I was taken aback again today by what I had witnessed. I will give the official response and we can then discuss the issue in more detail.

I thank the Deputies for raising the issue of the recognised problem of street injecting in Ireland. The establishment of supervised injecting centres has been proposed by the Ana Liffey drugs project. Such centres are essentially drug consumption rooms where drug injection is facilitated in a clinical setting under the supervision of nurses and counsellors. Service users are supplied with clean injecting kits and health care professionals are on hand to make an intervention in the event of a drug overdose. These centres save lives.

Supervised injecting centres seek to attract hard-to-reach populations of chronic injecting drug users. They are particularly effective in reaching out to marginalised groups, namely, those who use drugs on the street or in other risky and unhygienic conditions and those who have remained out of reach of or who are resistant to higher threshold services.

The Minister for Health, Deputy Leo Varadkar, and I have reviewed the evidence on supervised injecting centres and intend to submit a formal proposal to the Government before Christmas. The aim of any supervised injecting centre is to reduce the incidence of public street injecting and the negative impact it has on those who inject, in terms of their dignity, health and ability to access health and social care services, as well as on the wider community and public service providers such as gardaí and ambulance personnel. The aim is also to reduce the number of drug-related deaths resulting directly from overdoses.

No decision has yet been made on the number or location of such facilities. I intend to include additional heads in the Misuse of Drugs (Amendment) Bill to provide for supervised injecting centres. Drafting of the Bill is under way in the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel. The Bill will restore the Government's powers to make regulations to control new drugs. As Deputies will know, these powers were curtailed by the Court of Appeal judgment earlier this year. It is anticipated that the Bill will be published in early 2016 and provide for a legislative unblocking of any impediment to the introduction of medically supervised injecting centres.

I agree with Deputy Joe Costello when he says this is not a panacea. It is not the only response available to us. There are lots of overlapping concerns, including homelessness, isolation, marginalisation and disadvantage. A humane response to the issue of street injecting is to take the small cohort of very vulnerable drug users who are outside any mainstream drug programme off the streets, away from corners, bus shelters, parks and playgrounds and provide them with a safe, secure and compassionate setting where they can inject, as they will do anyway. The aim is to curtail the possibility of their contracting HIV or hepatitis C and to save lives. Nobody anywhere in the world who has injected in a medically supervised injecting centre has died of an overdose. There are 88 such centres across Europe and several in Australia and other parts of the world and they work very effectively.

I expect the legislation to be introduced in the House early next year, after which we will have to talk about management, the way any such centre would be organised, where they would be located and the funding mechanisms which would have to be put in place to run them effectively. I envisage one centre being opened in Dublin city centre initially, but representations are being made to my office to have supervised injecting centres opened in other urban centres, including Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Galway.

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