Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the motion and thank Deputy Joan Collins for introducing it. I welcome the positive and helpful amendments from Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin. The national drugs strategy is a very good strategy; I could not find fault with it. However, like A Vision for Change, it remains simply a strategy and the problem lies with its implementation. One could not improve on what is in it. It builds on two previous strategies, the second of which finished in 2016. This one is more health-focused and more person-centred which is welcome. With A Vision for Change, because nobody trusted any government, a separate independent monitoring mechanism was set up. It was set up for two three-year periods. It was wonderful. It gave the positive and the negative. It showed what improved and what did not. However, a previous government - I cannot remember which one - abolished it.

Similarly here, we have a wonderful strategy. That strategy is born out of pain and death, and it has come from the response of the communities that have fought on the ground and been ignored by a succession of Governments. That is where this strategy came from. The shorter-term plan had 50 actions which were to be completed by 2020. Is the Minister of State in a position to tell us how many of those 50 actions have actually been implemented? At the least I would have expected her to have outlined that in her speech today. We are responding to frustration from groups on the ground at the lack of implementation. I mentioned A Vision for Change because it is déjà vu. Of course the vision and the strategy are fite fuite le chéile. They are totally tied up with each other. We do not need any more strategies or plans; we need action and commitment. We need the Minister of State to outline how many of the 50 actions are implemented and when the remaining items will be done.

That is the sort of straight talking we need in relation to this. I agree with Deputy Gino Kenny when he says that we need an honest conversation about the decriminalisation of certain drugs.

We need a very honest conversation about alcohol. It is a major problem in Galway city. As for the level of suicide in Galway, I find it too upsetting to go into the number of deaths per week in Galway of people going into the water. It is tied up with many things. It is tied up with mental health, with the abuse of alcohol and the abuse of drugs. It is also tied up with our hypocrisy. To cite a very practical example, again in Galway, the Garda informed us that it could not prevent drinking on the street. Consequently we brought in by-laws but as there was a fault in these by-laws, a second set of by-laws was brought in. The Garda said it could not act until the councillors brought these in so we did. It is now an offence under the by-laws to drink on the street. Different interests, however, decided that people should be allowed to drink on a certain street and not on other streets. That was the first problem. The second problem is that the Garda states it does not have the staff to implement the by-laws. That level of hypocrisy is very apparent to the people who drink to excess. They see our hypocrisy. They see it in relation to our advertising and on how we promote sport through alcohol. That is something that we really need to face up to on a serious level. The Government and its Ministers will have my full support if it starts doing that on this issue.

It must start with the 50 actions and how many of them have been implemented. If they have not been, why not? There are problems, I understand, with governance on the ground. We face this every single Thursday in the Committee of Public Accounts, where governance issues repeatedly arise. We see a chairperson saying openly in the newspaper that he stayed on for a longer period of time, even though the recommended time was three years, because nobody else was there to take his job. I do not believe that is acceptable. There should be feedback mechanism when there is a shortage in respect of chairpersons or co-ordinators, because they simply cannot function on the ground without that sort of backup. Tá mo dhóthain ráite agam.

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