Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I pay great tribute to Senator Ruane and all the work she has done. She and I are both chairs of drugs task forces. I asked her for a reading list of things she thought I should be educated on to make me a better chair of a drugs task force. She led me down a route that has been fascinating and very educational. I read In the Realm of Hungry Ghostsby Gabor Maté. I also read The Social Distance Between Usby Darren McGarvey. A full chapter of that book analyses the cause of drugs and looks at the concurrence of social deprivation. Mr. McGarvey states, "While the causes remain disputed and continue to baffle many, people from the poorest communities are 18 times likelier to die a drugs-related death than those from more affluent areas." He is Scottish and is writing about Scotland.

One of the things I have been doing for the past year is looking back over the history of the constituency of Dublin South-Central and employment in the area in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Those are areas where is now a high concentration of DEIS schools, drugs task forces and services to the community. There has been known and recognised social deprivation in those areas. However, looking at the history of the likes of Inchicore, Rialto, Dolphin's Barn and Ballyfermot, there was huge employment from Guinness, Rowntrees, Semperit Tyres and Glen Abbey. Employment was also available from Dublin Corporation in its housing department, waste management and the general housing management department. There was massive employment and then, suddenly, there was not. Those places closed down and there followed generation after generation of unemployment which has now continued for decades. There was then the blight of Christy and Larry Dunne coming into those areas, filling them with heroin and wiping out whole generations of youth in the 1980s. The successors of the Dunne brothers have preyed on these communities.

I know a lot of the consideration of the citizens' assembly will be about what we decriminalise and I have huge sympathy for that. We need to not criminalise those who are the most vulnerable. We must support them. I welcome the meeting the Minister of State held with the chairs of the drugs task force yesterday. There was great hope at the end of that meeting, as there was throughout the meeting and in anticipation of it. One of the key features we must consider is how to track social deprivation and the concurrence with drug use and addiction. In areas such as, for instance, Dublin 12, there is a far greater instance of betting shops and places that sell alcohol. There are more drug dealers. There is open drug-dealing on streets such as Oliver Bond Street. It is a disgrace. Thankfully, the Minister for Justice, Deputy Harris, is working on that issue.

For a long time, we have been investing in drugs task forces. They are incredibly effective. It has been my great privilege to see how they work from the inside. When the Minister, Deputy Harris, was the Minister for Health, he considered safe injecting zones. We must include people and have respect for the dignity and humanity of people who are blighted by addiction. I want to read a short paragraph from The Social Distance Between Us because it is very powerful:

People with drug problems have invariably been portrayed as vulgar, selfish and feckless individuals, whose problems are entirely self-generated. The notion that they may actually care about each other and, indeed, take care of one another, has, thus far, eluded many. But drug takers survive by moving in tight-knit communities, bonded by the acute and social inclusion they endure — much like those experiencing homelessness. Every time one addict is found dead, others grieve. They sense too that they might be next. They feel that society has all but abandoned them. Socially excluded, bastardised by the public and misunderstood by many who wish to help them, what is there to live for? And so they do what we all do when terrible things happen: they reach for whatever numbs the pain. As they do, the social contagion spreads, tearing through entire families and communities, leaving death and despair in its wake.

My hope for the citizens' assembly is that we will track the concurrence of social deprivation and drug use among those who are most vulnerable. I am not talking about recreational users. I am entirely with the Minister, Deputy Harris, on this point. If you choose to take drugs recreationally, you deserve all that follows from it because you are feeding money into crimelords. People in social deprivation get into numbing the pain of being excluded and not having equality. For us to have a just society, we must have equality that includes positive discrimination in favour of these communities. That is what I hope will come out of this process. We need positive examples and insights into where we should be targeting the support for people in those communities who are most vulnerable to being preyed upon by drug lords.