Mary Fitzpatrick (Fianna Fail)
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Mr. Ryan stated earlier that the community safety partnerships had had excellent results. Could he send us some documentation outlining how the Department concluded that an excellent outcome has been reached on the part of community safety partnerships, particularly in the north inner city, because what I and others described certainly does not sound like excellence and does not appear to be excellence to the community? I want to understand how this excellence is being measured.

Regarding section 3, there are two sides to this argument. On the one side, An Garda Síochána needs section 3 to be able to intervene in the first instance and this ideally leads to a referral to health support and intervention. The other side is that it immediately introduces a criminalisation element and everything that goes with that for an individual. Has the Department done any work with An Garda Síochána in examining and assessing the impact of doing away with that section 3 power and taking away criminalisation at that point? If simple possession was no longer a criminalising event, how would An Garda Síochána operate in terms of trying to tackle drugs and drug abuse?