An Cathaoirleach: This is our first meeting of this very important committee on the subject of a health-led approach.  The committee’s members welcome the witnesses and thank them for coming here today.  We would like to hear from them over the next couple of hours.  I will introduce our guests.  Ms Anna Quigley is the project lead of the Citywide Drugs Crisis Campaign.  We also have members from the Irish Prison Service: Ms Caron McCaffrey, Mr. David Joyce, Ms Sarah Hume, Ms Anne Collins, the national clinical lead for mental health and addiction, and Mr. David Treacy.  They are all very welcome.  I invite Ms Quigley to make her opening statement.

Ms Anna Quigley: I thank the committee for the opportunity to be here today.  CityWide is a network of community organisations and activists set up in 1995 to campaign for a community development response to drugs.  That is about involving the communities most affected by the drugs issue in developing and delivering the services and responses we need.  CityWide has been at the heart of the State’s response to drugs since first being invited in by Government in 1996.  For more than a decade from 1996 to 2009, we experienced a genuine State commitment to community-led inter-agency partnership, but our experience in more recent years has been of a gradual and continuing decline of this commitment to a point where it is no longer implemented in practice, in our experience.  We strongly agree with the statements by Paul Reid, chair of the citizens’ assembly, about the absolute urgency of the current situation and with what we have heard from committee members about how the drug and alcohol task forces have been sidelined, structures for inter-agency accountability are not working and investment across services is inadequate.  It is important to state clearly and acknowledge that there are great people involved across all agencies and sectors but everyone is being failed by what is basically systemic dysfunction. I will highlight five key points as to how we can address this.  The first is a social analysis.  In our view, a starting point needs to be a social analysis that looks at both the context and causes of drug-related harms.  We know that drugs have an impact across all levels of society, that a significant majority of people who use drugs do not develop an addiction and that the worst harms continue to affect communities most affected by poverty and inequality.  This is key because how we respond needs to be informed and shaped by these realities and not by moral judgement and stigmatisation.  One of the very clear messages from our social analysis is that there is no basis for maintaining a policy of criminalising people who use drugs.  This has been supported by evidence the committee has heard from a range of international speakers.  It is also our experience in the community that a policy of criminalisation has the effect of undermining every other positive action we might take.  It needs to end now.  The worst harms relating to the drug trade also impact the communities most affected by poverty and inequality.  The levels of fear generated as a result of intimidation and violence in our communities prevent the normal social justice process from working.  We need to start an honest discussion about how we can address this reality.

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