Kate O'Connell (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I hope I will not be still speaking at 10.15 p.m.

Some of what I have written down mirrors what my good colleague, Deputy Michael Harty, said. I am coming at this issue from the perspective of a health professional. Fundamentally, a society is judged by how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable citizens. My experience tells me that substance abusers are just that - vulnerable, weak people who live on the fringes of our society. People do not choose that life. They are usually victims of circumstances far beyond their control. Who knows what might have happened to any of us if we were brought up in different circumstances or were exposed to different things at certain times in our lives. Anyone who has dealt with people with an addiction knows that they are trapped in a cycle of getting a hit, withdrawing, panicking about where they are going to get their next hit and so on. It is a vicious cycle in which they are trapped. The least we can provide for vulnerable people on the fringes of our society is a clean room, with a clean needle and swab, where they can inject themselves.

Public health policy should have harm reduction at its core. I know that it probably does not suit some people to hear this but we sell alcohol legally in this country. How many alcoholics do we have? We allow people to gamble legally. How many families have been destroyed by gambling? I was asked why we will not be giving addicts methadone in injection centres but they do not want methadone. They want heroin. They want to inject drugs. If they wanted methadone they could get it from a community pharmacy or a methadone centre. The core point here is that the legal classification of a drug does not make it any worse or better for a person. That is just the way it is. This is not about schedule 1 drugs or going against the law. It is about trying to sort people out in their most difficult time.

Water is to the fore in my mind these days and this is a bit like shoddy workmanship that results in a leaking pipe. One can say that it is terrible that the pipe is leaking but one still has to fix the pipe. I do not want to get political but we cannot keep going down the usual route. Until now, we have been going down the wrong road. Previous policies have not addressed the issue and have not worked, which is clear from the startling number of intravenous drug users all over the country.

I concur with much of what Deputy Michael Harty said. I will not mention specific towns but I have worked in about 60% of the country, geographically speaking, and can confirm that this is not just an urban issue. Intravenous drug use is rampant in many of our rural and coastal towns and people are turning a blind eye to it in many instances. Injection centres offer an opportunity to engage with substance abusers on a regular basis. Often addicts do not engage with the regular services and injection centres are a way of tapping into a vulnerable group and trying to improve their lives through the provision of various services. I hope it will prove possible to initiate them onto appropriate treatment pathways. Often intravenous drug abusers have slipped through the cracks of social services. They have removed themselves from their GP practice and from other services in their communities and injection centres are a way of engaging with isolated people. The centres can also be beneficial in terms of being gossip hubs. This can be useful if bad batches of drugs come onto the market. The centres can be a very good way of identifying wrong concentrations or contaminated batches of illegal drugs and in that sense, they can be a good way of communicating.

Injection centres are not just for drug users but are also for the wider public and the villages and towns that have been ravaged by drug abuse. In response to those Deputies who find this policy unpalatable and who are struggling to support this legislation, I ask them to consider how bad our society looks when we leave vulnerable people exposed on the streets, suffering in front of strangers who come to our shores to look at our beautiful country. Injection centres mean less drug paraphernalia on the streets. I am talking here about contaminated needles, swabs, bits of foil, blades and all sorts of things. These are all left on the streets now but there is evidence to show that providing adequate injection centres will reduce this.

Deputy Michael Harty has referred to the fact that supervised injection centres reduce the number of unnecessary hospital admissions. People are shown how to inject correctly and they tend to end up with fewer blood-borne diseases, septicaemia and the other complications that arise from intravenous drug use. We are not reinventing the wheel. I have not been qualified for very long but needle exchanges were being piloted when I qualified some years ago and have been shown to improve peoples' lives. My view on this has become more open over the years as I have become more informed and have seen that drug addiction can affect anyone.

I wish to address some of Deputy Danny Healy-Rae's comments. Nobody gets up in the morning and decides to take up injecting heroin. We need to try to improve people's lives to the extent that they do not see that as the option for them. As a society, we can deal with what is in front of us now in the most humane and practical way we know, which I believe is this policy. We also need to work to try to make people's lives better in order that is not the path that is the most opportune. That is not somewhere where my children will end up or the children of anybody else here. That is not the path that is laid out for people in life.

We have done great work in Dublin's north inner city to try to improve people's lives there and stop this continuing into the future. This is about reaching out to people who are more vulnerable than us. I ask anyone who is opposed to the Bill to meet some of us who are involved in this. This is about trying to do the best for society.

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