Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will take that opportunity to give a shout out to my Aunt Lorraine who agreed naively yesterday to mind my kids until 8.30 p.m. yesterday evening and ended up being there until the best part of 00:40 a.m. I think family friendly arrangements would definitely be beneficial for everyone in this House.

I will start my contribution in an area I had not planned. This is to follow Deputy Boyd Barrett’s point on the issue of drugs. So much of crime and safety, my experience of it and the experience of the places I represent, and those places that I do not represent, revolve around the illegal drugs industry. It has agency capture of huge chunks of my estate. I made a controversial statement here that I felt that the drugs industry probably employed more people in my constituency, as an industry, than some of the big employers. That sounds like a controversial thing to say. It sounds as though I am running down my own area. I am not. I am trying to give a picture of the scale of the number of people who are actually involved in it, sometimes at a really young age. The way we all approach the Citizens’ Assembly is in many ways the same as we approached the debate around the repeal of the eighth amendment. Everybody will have different views on this. We may make value judgments about whether we think something is positive or negative. We know that drugs have a negative impact on your body. Everything you put in your body has a negative impact.

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