Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Just in case I cannot keep myself together later, I support the two amendments in the first instance. This Chamber has proven more harmful to my mental health than my drug use ever did. I apologise for finding this very hard. There are many policies we can all speak about. The likes of the drugs policy has many threads. Decriminalisation is one of them. Blood-borne viruses, family support, suicide, dual diagnosis, imprisonment, and women and family are others. Every single Department is affected by drug use. Every single organisation that works in communities is affected by drug use. It is everybody's issue, not just an issue for the services that provide addiction support. It seeps into everything, whether you are working for Barnardos, with women, with children in care or for the prison system. It features everywhere. However, when I speak about it or try to platform it, it does not feel like it is felt everywhere. Intellectually, people know about it, but in their communities they can do a 360° turn without seeing the pain, harm, misery and deaths.

I find it very hard to speak here about policy without allowing it to seep into me that there is not a hierarchy. There has to be a hierarchy because a decision gets made. People sit around a table and decide what goes first. It is not picked out of a hat. A conversation happens at the table where what goes first is decided. All I hear and all people like me and my community hear is that we were not top of the agenda. We feel people do not really and truly understand what is going on in communities. There are families in my community who have to teach their three-, four- or five-year-old children what the recovery position is. There are women in their 70s who have to check in the morning whether their sons' chests are rising or falling to make sure their breathing has not slowed down from benzo use in the middle of the night.

I get that drug use is in all postcode areas and counties, but, while some in those areas can point to the people who are impacted, I can point to those who are not. That is the difference. The difference for me and my community is that being affected by drugs or drug use is not the exception. It is not the exception to know one, two, three or four people who have died of an overdose; it is the rule, the norm. That is the difference between the experience of others and the one I am trying to put forward in the hope people will not dismiss it by saying we all understand addiction. I am not saying people do not, but it is very different in how it is presented in particular communities.

When I worked in the drugs sector, I remember standing every year in Dolphin House while the names of every single person who died were called out. There were two or three women who had lost four, five or six children. They had outlived all their children, who had all died of drug use. Therefore, for every person someone in this Chamber knows has had an addiction, there are women who have lost every single one of their children to it, or to prison or crime. There are women who have found their children hanging from the rafters because they could not get access to services for nasal cocaine use. They could not get therapeutic services. The numbers of deaths in their communities are considerable.

This is also very much a women's issue. In the past few weeks, all I have been hearing about were platforms for women and women's issues, but 33% of the 400 people who access crack cocaine services in Tallaght are women. The majority of them are mothers. Where are their advocates? Who is fighting for their platform? For us, the citizens' assembly was the space to make that happen. Although people will say it will happen in autumn or 2023, we are measuring the delay in lives. We are measuring it in the loss of our families and communities. Every single second or day that the discussion is not happening presents a problem.

Services can barely keep their doors open. We keep talking about the cost of living. Nobody discusses the fact that services must keep their radiators off to keep service provision going for people who need intervention owing to drugs. The services cannot pay the ESB bill and at the same time provide intervention. There are services that are doing nothing but administration in an effort to find funding to carry out the interventions. The Simon Communities report stated 70% of its detox service users are homeless because of drug addiction. For me, every single Department and issue is somewhat affected by the drugs issue, but I do not see where it is being prioritised.

The hardest month I have had in this Chamber since I was elected was the one since the health committee considered the drugs strategy. This is because of the little bit of hope that I had that my time here could be worth something. So many times, I have regretted becoming educated. Imagine that. I do not want to have to be conscious or aware that this is how badly we are being failed. Imagine me wanting to go back to the moment when I decided not to be a problematic drug user. When I was, at least I really did not understand or see the facts that we are being failed at a systematic level and that neither my friends nor I were failures for being drug users. Rather, we were being failed at a much higher level through systematic violence against our communities. The moment you have that awareness and consciousness, you cannot go back and learn it may have been in your power to do something differently. That is where I am at today after six years in this Chamber. When the citizens' assembly is not being called and we have a drugs Minister who does not understand his brief, I just feel no one cares and no one is listening. Now I am at the stage where I am saying, "Please help us; someone, actually help us." I have moved past being a politician to the point of despair. Therefore, I ask Members to vote for the amendment. We should not be considering a lord mayor in this round. We just should not be doing it. We could have a councillors' assembly or another approach. There is urgency and we need to save lives, but we are deciding there is a hierarchy and not to address this issue now. That is a decision of the Government.