Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will start by providing Senator Colm Burke with a solution to drug dealers that is not a penalty and I would be happy to work with him on it. That solution is the possibility of prescribing in heroin injection centres to do away with the problem, although we are probably a few decades away from that idea.

I welcome this legislation hugely on a personal and a professional level. I remember that I first started looking into the possibility of supervised injection rooms during the first ever drugs work I did with young heroin users in Cushlawn. What alarmed me most then was when one of the lads came looking for me when he could not bring around one of his friends after he had injected. When I got there, rang the ambulance and put him in a recovery position, I noticed cigarette burns all over him. I asked the lads how he had got burned and found out that, for some reason, there was a culture which meant that if people overdosed in company, others would stick a cigarette in their hand so that it shocked them and woke them up.

This was the level of education and understanding at the time around addiction. Young people were resorting to all sorts of made-up ideas of what they should do to protect their friends or to bring them out of an overdose. They often did not ring an ambulance for fear the Garda would come as a result of that historical negative relationship that exists between the Garda and drug users. That is why the one part of the Bill I am concerned about, much like Senator Devine, is around the access of gardaí to the centre due to that historical relationship between young people, drug users and gardaí. I wonder how we can begin to mend some of those relationships so that people will not be afraid to use the centre, especially if they have a warrant or an outstanding charge which might impact on them using the service. So many homeless people do not make it to the courts or to their probation appointments and there will be bench warrants issued for them, and so on. If they know a garda can access the centre, will that put them off using it? This is not to say gardaí will in any shape or form abuse that. It is more the perception of the authorised user that they could access it. As someone who has worked in homeless services for a long time and who has had to deal with the issue of drug dealing, I know the staff are very quick to respond to any sign of drug dealing within a homeless service. I ask that something be done to ensure we encourage some sort of communication between the Garda and the people who run the service before gardaí gain access. This would mean we would not damage any further the relationship between drug users and the Garda.

Obviously, this is an area I have worked on for a long time. I will conclude as I think the other speakers have hit the main points. When I first looked into the issue of supervised injection in 2000, I thought it would never happen and that there was no point in pursuing it. I remember meeting a researcher, Tim Bingham, who now works for the HSE and who had done a lot of work on this. When I met him a few years later, I still thought it was so far out of reach that we would never achieve it. What I most want to do is commend and compliment the Minister of State, Deputy Catherine Byrne, on taking this on and running with it. It is a great honour to be able to stand here in the Chamber as someone who has worked on addiction and who has been affected by addiction in a million different ways throughout my whole life. It is great to watch this legislation go through the House. I thank the Minister of State for that.