Mark Ward (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)

I thank the Labour Party for bringing forward this really important motion. I apologise to Deputy Sherlock for interrupting her photo opportunity earlier as that was not my intention.

What underlies addiction is poverty, and a symptom of poverty is trauma and a symptom of trauma is addiction. It is a circle that keeps going around. I am from north Clondalkin. I grew up there in the eighties. It was a time of economic hardship across the country but areas like mine suffered the most. We grew up in poverty. This is not me standing up and saying "poor me", because when I say I grew up in poverty I did not know it because everybody around me was experiencing the same thing. We simply did not know any better. What we did know was not to ask our parents for too much because it simply was not there. North Clondalkin is an area of high disadvantage. I have seen the devastation drugs have inflicted in my area since I was a child. I live in the community still and I have seen the intergenerational addiction and trauma within families. This trauma, as I said, comes from poverty but also from parents of my friends being products of the industrial schools, the Magdalen laundries and the mother and baby homes. I can speak to this from personal experience because my father was sent to work in the Magdalen laundries at the age of 12. He is 72 now and is only starting to speak about it. This is the trauma people experienced and he knows I am speaking about this today. This trauma was unwittingly passed down by parents to the next generation.

When I say "area of high disadvantage" I am speaking about the government policies of the time, like putting people from the same socioeconomic background into the same area at the same time without having the necessary infrastructure there. When I say we were disadvantaged and in poverty we were not in poverty because of a lack of character or of strength, because the people from my area – my parents, neighbours and friends – had to get out and fight for every single thing our area had, whether that is schools, something simple like buses, health centres and everything else. My very first interaction with activism was fighting for a school in my area. We were sent to a school that was deemed inappropriate for other pupils in a more affluent part of the constituency but it was okay for the students of Greenfort, Shancastle and Harelawn to attend that school. That is what you are being put against. You had to fight that all the time. A lot of my family, friends and neighbours succumbed to addiction over the years. That is just a simple fact of things. While you cannot physically change the environment you are living in people look for alternatives and one of the alternatives they had to was to look at drugs, because they give people the ability to self-soothe and give calm to an anxious inner world. It is called getting out of your head for a reason. If you cannot get out of your estate you can get out of your head in a different way without having to move. It stops a problem for that very short time and then that problem turns into addiction.

I have only got half a minute left, which I will use to speak about local services. I have worked for years in front-line addiction services in my area. I do not know how long we have been calling for multiannual funding for. It is so important because it would allow agencies that are dealing with the front line to forward plan to deal with things when they arrive at the door. We knew the crack cocaine problem was an issue long before it was being discussed in this House because the front-line services were seeing it, but they had not got the resources to go out and tackle it. We need multiannual funding. If I could get one thing out of today, it would be that.

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