Brendan Smith urges urgent action on national drugs crisis

Thank you. I wish the Minister and Ministers of State well in their new roles. I compliment on Garda Siakana, the Revenue Commissioners and other statutory agencies on the work being done locally and nationally to deal with the scourge of drugs. As we all know, drug addiction and drug abuse are very complex issues and we need a multifaceted approach that includes health services, rehabilitation as well as the criminal justice system. I ask the Minister to outline any additional measures that will be implemented locally nationally to deal with what is a growing and very concerning epidemic at the present time throughout rural Ireland and urban Ireland. Thank you. I would like to thank the Deputy for his long-standing interest and thank him for raising this matter. Tackling the scourge of drug dealing and targeting the work of organised crime groups who inflict intimidation, violence and misery on families and communities in rural Ireland is a top priority for the Government and our Department. As part of Budget 2025, €36 million has been allocated to the Youth Justice Services. This investment will facilitate an increase in the capacity of youth diversion projects for young people who need them the most as well as an increase in support for families and early interventions for children who may be at risk of becoming engaged in criminal activity. This approach is strongly supported by evidence from the University of Limerick. The projects are community-based, multi-agency youth crime prevention initiatives which primarily seek to divert young people at risk of involvement in anti-social and or criminal behaviour. I am very pleased to announce the two projects last month which will achieve the target as set out in the Youth Justice Strategy of full national coverage. The Government is also fully committed to providing on Garda Siakana with the resources it needs to fight crime. This is reflected in the unprecedented allocation of €2.48 billion in the Budget of 2025 which is a 27% increase on Budget since 2020. We were delighted to witness that 149 new Gardaí passed out of Temple Moor over two weeks ago and to see over 200 trainees, the largest intake since 2019, enter the Garda College recently. This increase in Garda numbers is allowing for sustained investment in frontline policing and in specialist units such as the very successful Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau. Government Garda Siakana continue to implement the Enhanced National Anti-Drugs Strategy in Operation Tara, the focus of which is to disrupt, dismantle and prosecute drug trafficking networks at all levels, international, national and local, involved in the importation, distribution, cultivation, production, local sale and supply of controlled drugs. The Department of Health leads on Government policy in the area of drugs. This policy is guided by the whole-of-government National Drugs and Alcohol Strategy which sets out a health-led response to drug and alcohol use. I thank Minister Collins for his reply and I really look forward to more youth justice projects being rolled out. I think there are great investment in our young people and there are great investment in communities where there is particular disadvantage. Minister as you are aware this issue needs to be addressed with the utmost urgency. It is really heartbreaking to listen to parents, siblings and family members who have lost loved ones through the use of drugs. They are victims of those people who are peddling drugs and causing untold hardship in every community. I recall in this House previously that I listened to a mother who lost her son and her husband and she outlined very clearly the role that drugs played in their deaths to young people. It is absolutely appalling. We need as well Minister I believe more awareness campaigns and not just for teenagers or young adults. Based on what I hear in weekly conversations we need campaigns for every age group in the country. We are hearing daily of the prevalence of drugs in places where we never thought they would be present. Government has an obligation to provide safer communities for all and the one thing that we hear about nowadays is that drugs are everywhere. I know that the Deputy represents a border county and a border constituency and I just want to re-emphasise that there is ongoing close cooperation between Un Garda Siakana and our colleagues in the Police Service of Northern Ireland to tackle cross-border criminality including through the mechanism of the joint agency task force which was established under the 2015 Northern Ireland Fresh Start Agreement. This task force is producing results and helping to keep people safe is really practical, visible ways through custom seizures, identifying victims of human trafficking and joint days of action cooperation against organised crime groups. North-South cooperation in policing and criminal justice continues to be a priority for the Irish Government. Minister Jim O'Callaghan met with his counterpart in Northern Ireland, Minister Naomi Long, last week to discuss how best to combat serious and organised crime on our Ireland and we look forward to continued cooperation in relation to that. Thank you Minister. Again Minister I welcome your emphasis on the need for intensified cross-border cooperation because we know that these evil criminals who are peddling drugs cross-border so they do. There should be no tolerance for people who are peddling drugs and passing around cannabis or a line of cocaine, whatever social strata they come from. We have all listened to presentations where professionals working in this area outline the horrors inflicted on people through the use of drugs. We need to get that message out very clearly. I fully appreciate that we need to support people who unfortunately become addicted to different facets of their existence and of their lives. I have helped some of those people alongside local support groups in my own constituency in Cavanagh and across the North East. We need to resource those particular advocacy groups who are working with parents and with victims of the use of drugs. So I know those people who have recovered, who are in gainful employment today, rearing their families and contributing to society. Thankfully we have those instances where people with adequate support can recover. We want to ensure that in all policies that we do not lose sight of the fact that people can recover with adequate support. At the same time we cannot lose sight of the fact that criminal gangs and the people I mentioned earlier who are peddling death and destruction in every community in our country must be dealt with through a severe criminal justice system. Deputy Swit has referenced community safety and I suppose criminality in rural areas in particular as has the Deputy Opposite. I just want to reiterate that rural safety and community safety is not just a job for on Garda Siakana alone that it requires a multi-agency, multi-sectoral and whole-of-government response. Supporting the work of our National Rural Safety Forum, the Department of Justice first published Rural Safety Plan 2022-2024. That plan has a vision to ensure that people and communities in Ireland feel safe and are safe in their homes and places of work and their local environment. It does so by identifying five key areas that we will focus on to achieve the overall goal and these are community safety, burglary and theft, roads policing, animal crime and heritage crime. So we are going to produce a second Rural Safety Plan 2025-2027 later this year.