Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am incredibly proud to be a member of a party that has drafted this motion, and to call myself a comrade and a friend of Deputy Ó Ríordáin, who has pioneered reform in this space. It is beyond time that we woke up as a society and as law makers to the stark reality of drugs in our society. We have to face the world as it is, not as we would like our ideal world to be. The world of today, in the Ireland of the 2020s, we simply have to face the facts that by the law of averages, someone we care about, someone in our family or in our group of close friends, took illicit drugs last weekend. They may have taken them yesterday and they may take them today. That is a reality. It is about facing up to those facts.

Can we also admit that none of us would like to see the people we care about have a criminal record for consuming something that is readily available on the streets of every town and village in the land? We have a problem but it is not one that can be fixed with more gardaí, more prison cells, more prosecutions, or more convictions. Addiction to drugs is a health problem. For us to admit that the so-called war on drugs has manifestly been a failure is okay. It is okay to admit that. We are spending more than ever on the Garda and on resourcing the wider criminal justice system, yet drug use is rising. Deaths caused by drugs are high and the continuing threat of convictions associated with drug use has not prevented the use of cocaine rising by 10,000% in 25 years. As Deputy Howlin intimated earlier, when a policy is not working we have an obligation to change it. To do otherwise is criminal neglect. I represent an area where gangs fight over the drugs trade. I have seen people shot dead and many more maimed and butchered, homes destroyed by arson attacks, kids traumatised and decent people that I represent living in constant fear. I have been at the forefront of crafting a multi-agency response to this crisis in my community but I have also demanded a tough response against criminal gangs who make fortunes from the drugs trade. Thanks to our community and the members of the Garda in the Drogheda area, we have had that tough response. I make no apologies for demanding that we be tough on drug gangs and smugglers. Gang crime may have been quelled in my own area but drugs are still being dealt, despite the valiant efforts of the Garda. This is a reality for us everywhere.

There is no inconsistency in taking on the gangs and their ill-gotten gains and supporting that strategy, while at the same time wanting to see a sea change in our treatment of sick, isolated, and poor drug user who is at the end of that supply chain. With all of the money spent on so-called crackdowns, we will still see many people needlessly dying. Some people that I have known all of my life have died because of heroin addiction. We have seen and know too many people in our community who are now nothing short of ghosts occupying hollowed-out sick bodies. People are ill and bereft of hope. They are wandering our streets stigmatised and shunned. They have a health problem. If we met somebody on the street was apparently having a heart attack, we would go to help. If somebody is clearly sick because of their addiction to drugs and because of problem drug use, we shun them, stigmatise them and ignore them.

In so many cases, prosecution after prosecution simply has not deterred them. We are locking up too many people whose real need is for a treatment bed, not a prison cell. We pride ourselves in this country on being progressive but in the case of drugs policy, we certainly are not.

If we were to spend just 20% of the money we spend on the criminal justice side on intervention and treatment, agencies like the Red Door Project in Drogheda would not have to go cap in hand to the HSE every few months for short-term funds to retain critical social workers and outreach workers, positions the Red Door Project was, in fact, provided with because of the crisis in my town. This is short-termism at its best. Services like this should be provided simply as a matter of course. They should be de rigueurif we are to take the time to take an evidence-based health and patient-led approach to the use of drugs.

Can we all have that difficult, challenging conversation and democratic dialogue we need to have in a citizens' assembly format, drop the exhausting moral outrage we hear, take that evidence-based approach and deal with the world as it is, not how we think it should be?

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