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

I acknowledge the Minister of State, Deputy Colm Burke, who was a colleague on the Committee of Public Accounts. He added greatly to the body and, in fact, we missed him this morning. I wish him well in his role, in particularly with regard to public health and considering the recommendations of the citizens' assembly on drugs, which I will come back to.

It is interesting that Deputy Smith spoke about the role of the trade union movement in terms of the smoking ban. What is often forgotten is that it is not a smoking ban; it is a workplace smoking ban. Its introduction was very much pushed by workers. The conditions that many people had to work in, just because they were in the hospitality industry, were intolerable yet they were tolerated. The conditions in which many people who worked on aeroplanes had to work were intolerable and yet they were tolerated. Young people now might not believe that in the oxygen-filled environment on aeroplanes, people used to be allowed to smoke.

We only have to look at the figures in terms of the number of young people smoking. I see a large number of young people in the Gallery. Almost 50% of young people between 18 and 24 at the time smoked. There are different categorisations now but the figure is between 6% and 20%, depending on the age split. It is probably closer to 20%. This is a massive reduction.

For fear of challenging my leader's legacy, this is not all because of a decision by the Tánaiste. It was because many people in society, a silent majority in some ways, opposed the existence of tobacco and the prevalence of tobacco in society and wanted to see someone take a decision. I commend the Tánaiste on making that decision and I commend the civil servants in the Department. I also commend the trade union movement and the political parties at the time. In the 2004 local elections, it certainly was not the popular thing to be knocking on the doors about. There were people who were addicted. They were not casual consumers of the product. They were addicted to nicotine. They were not happy with the decision.

We should reflect on the entire debate, not only because of how we treated tobacco but also in the context of how we make decisions in the House. Sometimes there is a silent majority on an issue that maybe is not engaged in politics on a day-to-day basis and that does not engage with social media. They are not the first people who come up in a vox pop on RTÉ or elsewhere. Too often, commercial and sometimes non-commercial lobbies representing a minority of the Irish people take up a large amount of bandwidth in our public conversation.

There is a lesson there for us. While there might not be an immediate political benefit, there is certainly a long-term political benefit to making the right decisions and representing large numbers of Irish people who may have a position on this but are not actively engaged in any particular campaign. Maybe we should not listen to those commercial or non-commercial lobbies that often advocate against the larger public interest.

I will turn to what is probably the next or current great public health challenge, namely, the issue of illegal drugs. First, it is worth noting that in fighting tobacco, and we did set out to have a tobacco-free Ireland, never in our canon of measures did we consider the prohibition of tobacco. There are probably good reasons for that, given the fact it is established in the market as well as its prevalence. There was the real fear that we would essentially drive tobacco sales underground, it would be unregulated, and the substances could be unsafe. Unfortunately, in the illegal drug industry, many of the drugs people are using fall under those terms. They are in the grip of illegal drug gangs. The quantities vary, the potency varies, etc. In all the comparisons we make, it is worth noticing that difference. In trying to achieve a tobacco-free Ireland, we did not take a decision to ban tobacco but instead looked at a public health response.

On the issue of illegal drugs, the Government established a citizens’ assembly. I will not use the word “progressive”, but there were quite challenging findings made by citizens’ assembly. It came very close to voting to legalise cannabis. While I am not entirely certain if I hold that view at the moment, that is what the citizens’ assembly proposed. It had very strong support for a public health response rather than a criminal response to illegal drugs. This has been sent to a newly established committee of the House, which is chaired by Deputy McNamara. We have ten months left in this Dáil and I hope we will complete our report on that because we should respect the time, effort and work that was done by the citizens in the citizens’ assembly. Also, I want political parties and the next Government to tackle this issue of illegal drugs. Deputy Shortall and I represent a constituency where, in many places, the activities and sales made by the illegal drugs industry are open and obvious. I am not saying the answer to that is to legalise them, license them and allow them to open corner shops, but we cannot also turn a blind eye to the fact the illegal drugs industry is operating. The people who are using them are addicted in no different way, but perhaps in a more profound way, than the people who were the victims of the tobacco lobby 30 or 40 years ago. They were also addicted.

I read many of the contributions to the citizens’ assembly, and I thought one of them was really powerful. Somebody said that if their child were addicted to alcohol, they would first send them somewhere to be treated for that addiction, but if your child is addicted to an illegal drug, there is also the additional challenge of worrying whether you also have to be with them in court at the same time they are seeking help for their addiction. Ireland is on the cusp of an important decision here. We cannot do anything that makes this worse. We cannot do anything that exposes young people to a greater threat of addiction, but we do have to wrestle this issue back from the illegal drugs industry and take the people who are the victims back from its control. There is also the millions and millions of euro that is washed through these gangs, which infiltrates communities in many ways.

I will use this opportunity, the first occasion on which the Minister of State, Deputy Colm Burke, is present, to draw parallels between the way we have dealt with tobacco, which I believe is successful, and the challenge the Minister of State has in responding to the committee's recommendations and the report made by the citizens’ assembly. I wish him good luck in that. Our own local drugs task forces in Ballymun and Finglas would be delighted to meet with the Minister of State to discuss the challenges. They would no doubt mention the core funding they believe should be increased. Over time, we have diluted the resources and the ability of the drugs task forces to act as key stakeholders in our communities. As they have done with the Minister of State’s predecessor and every other predecessor in that role, they want to be very actively engaged with the Minister of State, so I invite him to Finglas and Ballymun to meet with those drugs task forces. I also invite him to meet with some of the Deputies in the House who may have been working on this issue for longer than I have done. There are a number of us. Deputies Ó Ríordáin, Hourigan and I, as well as many others, would be happy to sit down with the Minister of State to talk about how we might help and support him to make a courageous decision, as was made with tobacco.

As I said, I wish the Minister of State luck on it. It is not easy. By no means is it easy. I have one caveat, though. Since the recent referendum, there has been a suggestion that anything "woke" needs to now be rejected. People who are addicted are not a woke issue. People who are addicted have a medical issue and the State needs to respond. I am not underestimating the complexity of the response, but I urge the Minister of State to do everything he can.

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