Annie Hoey (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I wish to reflect on a public meeting I ran with my Labour Party colleague, Deputy Ó Ríordáin, and Senator Sherlock in the Dublin Skylon Hotel, Drumcondra. It was about drugs policy and the decriminalisation of the drugs user. We had some incredible speakers on the panel, including former Dublin GAA player, Philly McMahon, Fr. Peter McVerry, who everyone knows about, and Anna Quigley of CityWide, who is probably the most knowledgeable person on anything to do with drug use and drug policy in Ireland.

It was a privilege to listen to people who have experienced addiction and whose families have been affected by it. We listened to stories from the audience and it was moving to be in a space in which they felt safe enough to talk about their personal addiction experience or how addiction affected their families and cost lives. One person said it cost multiple lives in her family and, by the luck of the draw, it did not affect her and she went down a different path. That should not be how things happen.

There were some really difficult stories about family members who were lost. We did not prescribe how people would respond to the public meeting, but everyone who spoke from the panel and those who spoke about their personal experience, all agreed about decriminalisation and that if those addicts had not been criminalised, their lives would not have gone the way they did. A person spoke about how his brother being put into prison ended up being a rite of passage and made the situation even worse. His brother became one of the cool kids in his community and was even more hardened in his drug addiction. It was a rite of passage to be part of the grown-up gang of drug dealing and selling, and he died a couple of years later. Instead of treating a person's addiction, we try to criminalise it. Every person who spoke asked that if they or their family members had not been criminalised, what would their lives have looked like. It was profound that they all spoke about that.

We will table a motion in the Chamber tomorrow about drug policy reform and the decriminalisation of drugs, which will call for a date for the promised citizens' assembly on drugs. People who came to last night's meeting will be in the Public Gallery. They are people who have real, lived experiences of their own drug use or of drug use in their communities. They want to see Senators and the Government to taking a leading role in this regard. We have to have a citizens' assembly and we need to decriminalise it. Society is way ahead of the politicians. That meeting informed me as to where the people are on this subject, and it is time that we as politicians caught up.