Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State and wish her well in her endeavours. It is a positive to have a Minister of State with responsibility for the national drugs strategy with the background that she has, and also that she has no other responsibilities and that this will be her main focus.

The Bill arises from the High Court case of March 2015. So we have been waiting for this legislation for over a year. I agree with Senator Ruane's overall remarks in that this legislation flies in the face of what every other western democracy seems to be moving towards, which is to decriminalise the addict, the user, and to focus the attention on the pusher and those who benefit and profit from the drugs trade. I do not believe that having legislation that criminalises someone for possession of an illegal substance does anything for that individual.

In today's debate I have heard words such as "zombies". Other words are used in media to describe people in addiction. A number of months ago two individuals died from heroin overdoses within a couple of hundred yards of each other, one in the toilets of Connolly Station and another man who was found after a number of nights exposed in the open air. These individuals did not make the news. There was no march, petition, public outcry or media interest. At some level collectively, we seem to have decided that addicts are the authors of their own misfortune and, therefore, that their deaths are somehow self-inflicted. If we continue to go along with that type of narrative, we are destined to repeat the failures of the past. I do not believe it should be a criminal offence for a person to be caught in possession of something to which he or she is addicted. I am of the view that it is a waste of Garda time.

I also do not believe this legislation should separate out the issue of injecting centres. In my previous role as Minister of State with responsibility for this area, I felt I had gone a long way down the road of getting cross-party agreement on the part of the Bill relating to injecting centres. It had been passed by Cabinet and was due to be included in this Bill. With the best will in the world, I do not understand why the injecting centre part has been separated to be dealt with at a later stage. It does not make any sense.

My suspicion is that the responsibility of Government to react to the High Court case of March 2015 is foremost in the minds of those in the Department, the Minister of State and the Government, and that any progressive, forward-thinking way of tackling the drugs issue has to take second place. I am concerned and I hope the Minister of State can dampen those concerns and reassure me that the Government will give the same level of priority to the injecting centre model as it is giving to this legislation. However, it is very disappointing that it has separated it out.

If we reinforce what we always done, we will always get what we have always had. People have always taken drugs and it is quite likely they always will. To demonise and criminalise someone who has an addiction problem is in many respects to criminalise marginalisation. A disproportionate number of those who engage in drug misuse come from areas of social disadvantage and are people with disabilities, members of the LGBT community, migrants and Travellers. Statistically, it can be proven that the further people are disconnected from the mainstream of Irish society, the more likely they are to get sucked into addiction. When we criminalise possession of substances for personal use to feed a drugs misuse issue and to feed an addiction, we are criminalising marginalisation. That is effectively what we are doing.

I invite the Minister of State to go to the drug court, if she has not done so already. It is a good initiative with some limited success. Effectively, what one sees there is a bunch of sick people sitting in a courtroom. Sick people do not belong in a courtroom; sick people belong in a medical facility. It is pointless in the extreme to continually suggest that the solution to the drugs issue in Ireland is a criminal justice one. It is not; it is a health solution. We will eventually will come to the conclusion that what has been done in Portugal is a much more humane and potentially successful approach because it puts the needs of the addict at the centre of public policy and does not dehumanise that addict by using words such as "zombie" or terminology that others in the media use openly and without censure, effectively categorising them as being little more than junk.

While my party and I are happy to see this Bill progress to Committee Stage, I am disappointed at the separating out of the injecting centres. This move feeds my suspicion about the commitment to that not being as strong within this Government as it was in the previous one, notwithstanding the Minister of State's personal commitment to the issue. I have no difficulty with controlling substances and continuing to control substances that are causing intense harm. However, if we continue to criminalise the possession of substances to which people are addicted because their bodies are crying out for them, we will continue along the road that has caused so much hurt.

There were 679 drug and alcohol-related deaths in Ireland in 2013. Not all of them were drug-related incidents. Many were traffic-related incidents and many were suicides. Everybody in this Chamber should ask why they did not hear about those two individuals who died of heroin overdoses in a toilet in a train station and a few hundred yards away on Foley Street only three months ago. It may be because we continually blame the person who is the victim.