Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)

I have some questions. A question was asked about the make up of the drugs task force and the pillars that make up drug rehabilitation, education, health, justice, social protection, and child and family. We all accept it has been a fault line or a weakness in the system that those key players or people of influence are not around the table. If members agree, this is certainly one of the issues we can raise with the Minister. It should be a recommendation. It will be agreed by most people familiar with this situation that we are moving back instead of moving forward. I do not believe I was even elected as a public representative when former Deputy Chris Flood, the Minister of State in health at the time, asked political parties' representatives to get involved in drugs task forces. It goes back that far.

We had a meeting last week with the Joint Committee on Drugs Use. A number of groups came in and the common theme from the people who spoke was that they have never seen it as bad in their communities. There is no sense of that within the Oireachtas. I do not think there is a sense of that as part of debates or at meetings and so on. What does it mean when we say it has never been as bad? One of the things it means is that the age profile of those involved is getting younger and younger. We hear of kids of seven years of age partaking in illegal drugs, including nitrous oxide. People used to talk about cannabis as the gateway drug but this is the one that is really frightening out there. It is amazing the number of people that do not know this. They start off with these silver bullets and then it is huge containers. The challenge is that these are legal and illegal. They are illegal to consume but they are legal for bakeries and coffee machines and so on and are needed for such uses. I put forward simple legislation that, much like cigarettes, you could not sell it to kids. Again there seemed to be consensus among everyone on that but we were not able to move the legislation to do that. It seemed a simple thing we could do.

There is a normalisation of drugs in many communities, something we have been talking about for years. The witnesses have spoken about drug intimidation and the impact this has on families and communities. This is another aspect that has changed. We had a centre in my locality that was attacked by the people who were selling drugs outside it. Perhaps a person had gone out and asked them to move and the centre was set on fire. That was a new norm that had never happened before and we had not seen that. It used to be the norm that people would be able to get supports without having to run a gauntlet of drug dealers. This is another barrier that has gone.

The Minister of State will be coming in and he will talk of the amount of money being spent. The witnesses have said that it is 5% less than the past five years-----