Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the Minister of State's response and I accept there has been a lot of good work and extra resourcing of the Garda. However, gardaí say they do not have all the services they require. A car belonging to the drug squad in Dundalk was attacked at the Garda station. That is the level of brazenness of the criminal gangs. They have operated for too long and we need to deal with them.

Gardaí say consistently that addiction services are insufficient. They lift people for sometimes minor and sometimes more serious crimes and those people cannot access addiction services, so we go around in a circle. I go back to the fact that we need a person at governmental level who takes in the people from health and even from the local authorities and housing because we have issues there. I can talk about my own town, where a large number of serious players and drug dealers own their own houses and have plentiful supplies of money. That is where the Criminal Assets Bureau needs to come in. These criminals use people who are vulnerable as their front end. That is what needs to be dealt with because we are talking about communities that have been living with this for ten or 15 years in a serious way. These criminals are becoming more brazen. We need to take them on.

We also need to ensure we are serious about harm reduction. The superintendent in Dundalk said at a recent joint policing committee meeting that drugs are literally the most serious issue he has to deal with in his region and that he requires greater resources to give the drugs unit what it requires. We have had a chief superintendent who said we will lose an entire generation to cocaine. We need to ensure that this issue is dealt with at Cabinet level, somebody takes control and we can deliver a solution and look after our communities that are suffering from all this criminality.

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