Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North-West, Fianna Fail)

I welcome the debate on this issue as I have on many other occasions and acknowledge Deputy Sherlock for bringing the motion forward. I also acknowledge how appreciative I am of participating in the debate. I remind my Opposition colleagues that they fought tooth and nail to exclude Government backbenchers from participating in Private Members' Bills being brought forward by the Opposition but on the day that is in it, let us be collegiate. The reason I say that is it is important that people from different perspectives contribute to this debate.

Deputy Kenny's contribution earlier was important because he talked about going on a journey. There are lots of people that we need to expose to the medical evidence. We need to expose them to the work of the citizens' assembly and the Oireachtas joint committee. There is a huge body of work. Deputy O'Donoghue's contribution was important as well. We can have a law-and-order approach on this and a compassionate health-led and, I believe, decriminalised approach to the possession of personal drugs because the people who are the problem here are those who are trafficking, selling and manufacturing large quantities of drugs, making millions of euro out of it and exploiting people with an addiction.

Something I thought most informative from the Oireachtas joint committee hearings was the Portuguese police contribution stating that more of their time was now available to tackle the drug gangs and the people selling drugs in large numbers as a result of not prosecuting small personal possession. The Minister of State mentioned the Department's position on this and in some ways, I wish the joint committee engagement had happened in advance of this debate. We can tease things out at the committee.

Paul Reid clearly said that the citizens' assembly was clear it wished to remove the possession of drugs from the criminal justice system. The difficulty with not removing the criminal sanction is that if we leave any element of discretion under that principle, we will leave ourselves in a difficult position and we will not move forward on it. If, for example, we give gardaí the ability to have discretion as to whether some type of people would be prosecuted or other types of people would not, we would put an unfairness and an injustice at the heart of our drugs policy. We should have an approach were we decriminalise the person and not legalise the substance and if we did that, we would be able to progress a strong health-led approach. I welcome the wording in the programme for Government, which was also welcome by CityWide, the respected organisation, but there is an expectation that we do exactly what Paul Reid said and remove the criminal justice system from the possession of drugs.

Whatever system comes forward on that, we cannot leave any type of discretion with individual gardaí. The reason I say so is that while we could say, "Surely you would leave that to the discretion of the local gardaí", drugs policy will be policed differently in different communities . In some areas, gardaí might penalise people who are sleeping homeless. They might decide that they are going to penalise working communities that have high levels of drug sales when there might be the same level of drug use in middle-class communities. We cannot leave an element of discretion in the law. We would not do it in other areas. I have seen it compared, for example, with the decriminalisation of sex workers where we put the criminal sanction on the person procuring the service, not the person selling it. Let us imagine we had said, "but we will leave a discretion so that the person who was selling the service might be prosecuted". It would not work. If we believe that vulnerable person has an addiction, we should not have the criminal justice system involved in that; we should only have health-led approaches. I urge the Minister of State to examine that section as she goes before the Oireachtas joint committee to examine and tease out all of the provisions.

The joint committee made clear that it wanted to repeal section 3 but it must be replaced. Members were also clear on the point about removing the criminal justice system from possession itself. The key people that we have to target are those who are selling drugs and who are exploiting people who have experienced trauma or living in poverty or who perhaps tried this on a recreational basis and became addicted because of other factors.

Deputy Tóibín stated that it makes it easier for parents to dissuade people from drugs use by it being illegal. If the Deputy were correct, we would not have the drugs problem we have at present.

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