Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Ó Ríordáin for bringing forward this motion. It is a huge topic. A person would need two and a half hours rather than two and a half minutes to try to address some of the issues. The drug crisis is something that I have seen in the community in which I grew up in the north-east inner city and in the community I moved to in west Dublin. In some ways, there is a common denominator in both communities. They are working class with large pockets of disadvantage with poverty, unemployment, early school-leaving and decades of trauma. Mostly, it is young working-class people who are criminalised even though drug use is widespread in the entire population. We can never underestimate the extent of drug use. It is in every town, village, club, bar and sports club. Now, more than 40 years since Ireland experienced its first wave of drugs in the early 1980s, it is worse than ever. While heroin use might have reduced, along with its impacts, crack cocaine is the most dangerous drug we face in the coming weeks. I recently read a report on Ballymun on this which is utterly frightening.

However, I remain optimistic that we can turn the corner in drug abuse and misuse but we need to change the way it is tackled. First, we need to talk about funding. Funding is critical. The organisations on the ground need the funding that has been cut from them over the past ten years or so. However, one transformative thing we can do is to recognise in the law that people who are using drugs are not criminals and should not be criminalised. If we are genuinely to treat drug addiction as a health issue, then we need to provide the services to support people and not jail them for the possession of drugs. That serves no purpose whatever. If it served a purpose, it would have worked. We can see that it has failed miserably.

There are people who are not here today because injection centres have not been delivered. There are hundreds of those people. We need to deliver that as quickly as possible. Finally, I commend every person who is out there on the front line in services fighting every single day and also the families who are with them fighting against drug addiction. We need to support them. This is a timely motion on how we go about doing that.

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