Joe O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will flesh out a little my Department’s responsibilities on the national drug strategy. My Department has two main goals within the strategy, both of which are implemented under SICAP. These are to provide supports, including homework clubs, additional tuition and career guidance counselling and to support community awareness of drugs programmes and youth work in collaboration with schools and other youth programmes and second, to use SICAP to improve the life chances and opportunities of those that are marginalised in society, living in poverty or unemployment through community-development approaches, targeted supports and inter agency collaboration.

In the spirit of cross-departmental collaboration, it is worth mentioning something under my remit in the Department of Social Protection, namely, the community employment, CE, drugs rehabilitation schemes. We have about 840 participants on these schemes across the country. I was in Kildare town and Athy a couple of weeks ago and visited two of the schemes there, with the DARA project in Kildare. I would recommend that all Deputies visit their CE drugs rehabilitation scheme. Amazing work is being done there at a community level to bring people back from not being in a good place in addiction.

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