Frances Black (Independent)

The Minister of State is very welcome to the Chamber. This is the first opportunity I have had to congratulate her on her new role. I hope she is very well settled into her brief. I know she is very passionate about this area. My colleagues and I in the Civil Engagement Group look forward to working with the Minister of State in the term ahead, particularly my colleague, Senator Lynn Ruane, who is very passionate about promoting harm reduction in Irish drugs policy and in making our approach to drug use and addiction more humane and person centred. Senator Ruane would really like to have been here tonight but she is launching the canal communities local drugs and alcohol task force new public safety strategy this evening. She really regrets that she cannot be here but she is due to meet with the Minister of State in the coming days.

The Minister of State and I met recently at an event that was run by the Family Addiction Support Network. I set up the Rise Foundation after going back to college to study addiction therapy and I ended up working in the Rutland Centre. It was there that I met with families and I saw the impact of alcohol and drug harm on those families. I realised quite quickly that they needed their own separate service and their own supports separate from the person. There is no doubt that addiction is a family disease. The whole family is impacted. There is not a family in this country that does not know somebody or have somebody. I just wanted to say that. The Rise Foundation, as the Minister of State will be aware, is something that is very close to my heart and I am still very much involved in it.It takes an awful lot of courage and strength for family members to step into their own recovery regardless of whether their loved one is in recovery or not. I want to give a shout out to all the amazing families who want to step into their own recovery.

The national drugs strategy is a hugely important guiding document that sets out the State's aspiration in responding to drug use and addiction in Ireland. The expiring strategy, Reducing Harm, Supporting Recovery2017-2025, presented a step change in our approach, imbedding a commitment to a health-led response to drug use in addiction in both policy and practice. While the strategy has had some notable successes, the step change that it promised has not been fully realised. On the one hand, we say we have a health-led approach but, on the other hand, we still operate within an inflexible punitive model that criminalises people who use drugs. I think this is a worry.

The development of the new national drugs strategy is occurring at an important juncture. The Citizens' Assembly on Drugs Use published its final report and recommendations in January 2024, presenting a mandate for the State to implement a comprehensive health-led approach to drug use in Ireland and to begin to undo the damage caused to individuals, families and communities by the criminalisation of drug users. Building on the momentum of the citizens' assembly, the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Drugs Use was convened in March 2024 to consider the assembly's report and provide a roadmap to the Government about how we could give effect to its recommendations, publishing a landmark interim report last October. The new Joint Committee on Drugs Use will commence in public session after the summer. It would be really important to provide its members the opportunity to feed into discussions on the new strategy, if this is not already planned. Could an addendum to the strategy be considered, perhaps once the committee has prepared its final report, to ensure that there is synergy in terms of the policy direction?

Both the citizens' assembly and the joint committee arrived at the same conclusion, namely, that the status quo response to drug use in Ireland had failed and a transformative shift was required to remedy it. That transformative shift should be underpinned by the decriminalisation of drug possession for personal use. When we refer to decriminalisation, we must be clear that we are ultimately talking about decriminalising the person - the drug user - who has a substance in his or her possession for personal use, not the substance itself. Decriminalisation does not mean sanctions, coercion or mandated diversion. Instead, decriminalisation means an entirely voluntary, health-led and informed intervention that sees all of the person and not just his or her addiction.

As I have said many times, no child says he or she wants to be into drug addiction when he or she grows up. People are powerless over it. A health-led approach is extremely important. From my own work with the RISE Foundation and working in the prison with the women, these were all people who had been in drug addiction, and I know that if they had gone the health-led approach, their lives and the lives of their families would have been completely different. It is just another way of looking at it. They were all amazing women, by the way.

I was pleased to see a health-led approach reflected in Fianna Fáil's manifesto for the general election. It is something that my colleagues in the Civil Engagement Group, CEG, and I called for to be included explicitly in the new drugs strategy. I hope that the Minister of State will be in a position to provide the House with some clarity today about discussions that are being had within the Government and the Department of Health about implementing a policy of decriminalisation. Has the Department received guidance from the Attorney General about implementing decriminalisation without the creation of new laws? Have any risks or limitations been identified?

At the heart of the national drugs strategy is the community drugs sector, local drug and alcohol task force, community drug projects and civil society organisations. These services have the greatest interface with people who use drugs in Ireland and, alongside those with lived and living experience of addiction, have the best understanding of what is working and what is not and how we respond to drug use. Significant concern has been expressed by the community drugs sector about the role that it played in the evaluation of the expiring strategy and its ability to influence the development of a new one. While we appreciate that it might not have been the explicit intention of the Department, the sense from many community drugs projects that have engaged with us is that they have been sidelined in the process. The national oversight committee has been engaged by the Department, but it seems there is a lack of clarity about the nature of the involvement. Additionally, there is little clarity about whether consultation has taken place with people who have lived experience of drug use in designing the new strategy. As a result, we could end up with a strategy that fails to include the valuable insights or perspectives of drug users, drug services, community development projects or their members - key partners in any successful implementation.

I ask the Minister of State to say whether the stakeholders and the national oversight committee will have sign-off on the new strategy before it is published. Please explain what that process might look like.

The community drugs sector previously had to advocate very strongly for the retention of community as a core pillar in the national drugs strategy. It is hugely important that we continue to keep community at the heart of our national drugs strategy and recommit to a community development approach that sees people in the context of their own environment and experience and empowers communities to respond to drug use in an exclusively locally driven and socially informed manner. The incorporation of the principle of community development is important, but so is the resourcing that facilitates community projects doing the work that will meaningfully shift the dial. The community and voluntary sector wants to be doing this work but is heavily constrained by funding, resourcing and the bureaucratic boxes that are often required to be ticked. We need to see a meaningful resourcing of the sector so that we can see the true value of the interventions that it provides in our communities.

While there are a multitude of other areas that Senator Ruane and I would like clarity on, the final point I want to address is the creation of a dedicated Cabinet committee on drug policy, chaired by the Taoiseach. This is something that was called for by both the citizens' assembly and the joint committee. Given the seriousness of the issue in Ireland, a country that, to our shame, has among the highest incidence rates of drug-induced deaths in Europe, the creation of a Cabinet committee would send a positive message to individuals who use drugs, their families and their communities, a message that says that we acknowledge our past failures and are committed to making the transformative changes required to realise a more compassionate, humane and evidence-led approach to drug use and addiction. I think that the Minister of State is the one who can lead on all of this. I have no doubt that she has the will, knowledge and compassion to do this. I really do know that she is very passionate about this issue and I thank her for that.