Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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Apologies have been received from Deputies Ward and Gould. Deputies O'Reilly and Seán Crowe are substituting for them.

Parliamentary privilege is considered to apply to the utterances of members participating online in a committee meeting where their participation is from within the parliamentary precincts. There can be no assurances in relation to participation online from outside the parliamentary precincts, and members should be mindful of this when they are contributing.

The topic of our meeting today is family and community. This is the fourth part of this committee's module. We have a number of distinguished guests today. From Pavee Point, I welcome Mr. Thomas McCarthy, drugs, alcohol and addiction programme co-ordinator, and Mr. John Paul Collins. From Belong To LGBTQ+ Youth Ireland, I welcome Ms Brenda Kelly. From Connect 4 Project, I welcome Mr. Paul Perth, team leader, and Mr. Robert Whiteley. From Youth Workers Against Prohibition, I welcome Mr. Karl Duque and Mr. Eddie D’Arcy. From Traveller Counselling Service, I welcome Mr. Thomas McCann, director.

I invite Mr. Collins to give the opening statement from Pavee Point.

Mr. John Paul Collins:

I thank the Chairperson and members of the committee. Pavee Point welcomes the opportunity to make a presentation today and in particular is encouraged that this Joint Committee on Drugs Use is undertaking a health-led approach and that the needs of Travellers and Roma are included in overall discussions of the committee. We also welcome yesterday's interim report by the committee that largely reflects the citizens' assembly recommendations. We call on the State to urgently ensure both reports are reflected in the upcoming national drugs strategy.

Today, we will focus explicitly on Travellers and drug use. However, we encourage the committee to examine the needs of the Roma community at a later stage in its deliberations. This committee will consider the recommendations in the report of the Citizens' Assembly on Drugs Use. We have provided a detailed submission which will serve as a reference document should members need it. We broadly endorse all of the citizens' assembly recommendations. We will look at the specific issues regarding Travellers and the recommendations, leaving time for a discussion, which will be the best use of the committee's time.

My name is John Paul Collins. I am a community worker with Travellers and a Traveller. I have been working in this area for almost 30 years and I stress to the committee that in those years I have not seen the situation on the ground as bad as it is now. In 2010, the All-Ireland Traveller health study reported that almost seven out of ten Travellers considered illicit drug as a problem within the community. Today, I believe we are closer to almost all Travellers reporting this as an issue. It would not be an exaggeration to say that most Traveller families across the country are in some way impacted by drug use or the drugs market, whether directly or indirectly. This is an issue for Traveller women, Traveller men and Traveller children who are all witnessing what I can only describe as an epidemic. While we know this is an issue for the general population, the experience of Travellers is acutely felt and informed by institutional racism which creates the conditions for inequality of access, participation and outcomes as related to drug policy and services. This is particularly pronounced for Traveller women, Travellers with a disability and LGBTQI Traveller community. We cannot talk about a health-led approach to drugs without referencing the fact that 90% of what affects a person’s health happens outside the medical system and, therefore, racism, discrimination, living conditions, poverty, employment, educational attainment all impact Travellers and require a wider response that includes collective community development and a robust policy response. The unacceptable poor health status of Travellers should not be a surprise to members of this committee or others in the Oireachtas.

Pavee Point has been here many times, highlighting these appalling statistics: the mortality rate and infant mortality in the community are four times higher than in the general population. Travellers live on average more than decade less than non-Travellers. To put into context, as a Traveller man, I will be lucky to see my 65th birthday, whereas for my colleagues here today, that is a given. Our suicide rate is the highest in the country at seven times higher than the national average and accounts for one in ten Traveller deaths, some of which we know are a result of addiction. Some 39% of Travellers are effectively homeless, which means doubling or trebling up on unsafe sites and includes those living on the roadside or in emergency accommodation. Living in such desperate and stressful situations leads people to cope in different ways including drug use. This was particularly apparent during Covid-19, when an increase and normalisation of substance misuse was very evident in our community.

When it comes to substance misuse, we know that Travellers are disproportionately represented in the available drug and alcohol statistics, accounting for almost 3% of drug and alcohol treatment episodes in 2023. This is four times the national average according to the Health Research Board. We understand these figures are a conservative estimate as some Travellers are reluctant to reveal their ethnicity due to fears of racism and discrimination in services. We also know that not all services collect information on ethnicity or do not do it within a human rights framework, which Pavee Point urgently recommends they do in line with public sector duty. We need good information to inform evidence-based policy-making and improve service provision. Without proper data we cannot see how Travellers, Roma and other minorities fare in services. What we do know from our work is that Travellers experience discrimination and racism in accessing services. This has been validated by a number of pieces of research, including the All-Ireland Traveller health study, which reported that seven out of ten healthcare professionals admitted that anti-Traveller racism and discrimination existed in services. Drug services are not immune to this. Traveller organisations are working to encourage Travellers to get help for substance misuse but Travellers and other minority groups have particular needs which are not being met. We also know that Travellers are disproportionately overrepresented in the criminal justice system. Travellers make up 8% of the male prisoner population, 16% of the female prisoner population and almost one fifth, 21%, of children detained in Oberstown. In many of these cases, addiction is a mitigating issue. A recent report by Irish Travellers’ Access to Justice highlighted systemic racism within An Garda Síochána and the judicial system which has led to racial profiling and criminalisation of Travellers. This has led to poor relationships and low levels of trust within our community. Travellers are particularly vulnerable to the illegal drug market and criminal drug gangs both within and outside the community. Gangs target and intimidate Travellers and exploit the vacuum left by inadequate Garda protection, leaving Travellers to feel like they need to fend for themselves.

This is a recipe for disaster and conflict. We endorse citizens' assembly recommendation 26, which calls for a zero-tolerance approach to drug-related intimidation and violence. However, we need to ensure that measures are not used to further criminalise Traveller drug users or as pretence for over-policing of our community. We do not present these statistics lightly. We do so to show the interconnection between what we see on the ground and the need to ensure that a health-led approach to drug use is inclusive of the broader social determinants. Cross-government and agency responses and resources are required if we are to seriously tackle these issues. The citizens' assembly was also very clear on this, recommending the that the Government provide leadership and accountability at the highest political level, including a dedicated Cabinet committee on drugs chaired by the Taoiseach, which we also endorse. While the national drugs strategy referenced social determinants as a key principle, it has not been applied in practice, particularly in relation to Travellers. We feel that for the most part, we have been left behind. Despite the overwhelming evidence of the devastating impact of addiction on Travellers, we remain invisible in mainstream drug and alcohol policies. The national drugs strategy contained only two actions with reference to Travellers, combined with other groups of interest.

The national oversight committee of the national drugs strategy, the body that oversees the implementation of the strategy, has ignored requests by Pavee Point for direct Traveller representation on this structure. Instead, we have been advised that the national Traveller health action plan is a mechanism that will address these issues. However, the plan only contains two actions related to substance use and addiction and, although welcomed, the plan has not received any new core funding since 2022. We believe this demonstrates the lack of political will and that Traveller health is not a priority at departmental level. It is important that this is addressed in the development of the next strategy. There is a need for both targeted and mainstreaming actions to address the needs of Travellers. It would be remiss of me to not acknowledge some of the positive developments over the past number of years, particularly the work of those in the drug and alcohol sector and the HSE that is innovative, impactful and show outcomes. These models should be further developed, resourced and mainstreamed.

Paul Reid, the chair of the Citizens' Assembly on Drugs Use, advised this committee that the clock is ticking. Our community’s lives and future are on the line. There is no time to waste. To address these issues, we recommend the following. There should be urgent development of the next national drugs strategy, inclusive of a robust implementation and monitoring plan with clear targets, indicators, timeframes and budget lines, with actions being resourced and implemented by all Government Departments and relevant statutory agencies. Target actions, in particular, are required to address the intersectional needs of Traveller, Roma and other ethnic women. The national Traveller health action plan should be fully implemented, with increased multi-annual funding for Traveller organisations to support targeted measures related to substance misuse and addiction. Traveller and Roma health inequalities, including addiction, should be prioritised and mainstreamed within the Department of Health and across the HSE into existing and forthcoming health policy and service developments. A social determinants of health response that is culturally appropriate should be provided to addiction, in partnership with Traveller organisations. This should be underpinned by the community development approach, including mandated anti-racism training, inclusive of anti-Traveller and anti-Roma racism, to all relevant agencies. Ethnic identifier monitoring should be implemented, including a standardised ethnic identifier across all health administrative systems, including drugs services, to inform evidenced-based policies and services. It should also be ensured that reporting of disaggregated data based on ethnicity and gender, at a minimum, forms a part of the ongoing annual reporting requirements set out by the Department and HSE. I again thank the committee for inviting us in.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I thank Mr. Collins. I invite our next speaker, Mr. Perth, to give his opening statement.

Mr. Paul Perth:

I thank the committee for inviting us to speak today. We are here from the Connect 4 Project, which is a street work project set up almost three years ago by South Dublin County Partnership and the Tallaght drug and alcohol task force. It has just received a further two years of funding after a successful independent evaluation of the pilot. We have five dedicated workers on the team currently based in west Tallaght, parts of which are known to have extreme disadvantage and unemployment. Indicators point to educational disparities between large pockets of west Tallaght and national levels of educational attainment.

The concept of "street work" can mean different things in various contexts and we have spent considerable time defining what it represents for us. As we map our target area and assess the changing needs of the community, we continuously adapt our strategies and goals to better address the needs of the young people we engage with. Who do we work with? Young people aged from ten to 24 are our remit. As with many youth workers, it is nearly impossible to include a range of different ages. I refer to seven-, eight- and nine-year-olds, mothers, fathers and grandparents. This is our reality. In recent times, we have seen many changes in the youth work approach. This includes language, and a change from "centre-based" to "outreach" and from "the hard-to-reach" to "the harder-to-reach" and even "the extremely hard-to-reach". The term "at-risk young people" has become "the most-at-risk young people", and so on.

We pose the question of whether young people have always been so hard to reach or if the new generation of young people is becoming more disconnected? Are they choosing to exclude themselves or is it actually us disengaging with them? We need to be critical about this question as a sector. Our experience has shown us that the vast majority of young people are actually not that hard to reach. Usually, in fact, the young people who may need external supports are the most visible in our community. These include the groups at the shops and those in the areas we like to call "hotspots". Over the past several years, it has become clear to us that reaching these cohorts is actually the easy bit. The challenge for us is keeping them engaged long enough to allow us to form any kind of meaningful relationship, one that allows us to break down the barriers that many have erected to keep themselves safe.

We believe these barriers stem from years of neglect by the State and carry through to the present day. There has been a lack of investment, not only in youth services but in other vital services needed in our area, and similar, that would allow our children to begin to heal from the hurt and pain they have suffered for years from many different sources. These include physical and domestic abuse, poverty and intergenerational addiction and trauma. Our local schools are starved of services such as art, occupational therapists and speech and language therapists, all of which are crucial to the development of young people, many of whom are impacted by the issues associated with disadvantaged and under-resourced communities. We recently spoke to the principal of a local primary school who regularly refers children for neurodiverse assessments. It is not unusual for her to witness a child going through the whole of primary school without receiving an assessment. That is six years. This is before children move on to secondary school, where they must start the process all over again. These children are being grossly let down and many of them are ending up on the merry-go-round of the criminal justice system.

I love youth work. In its current state, it plays a vital role in the lives of many young people. We are, however, observing a growing trend in our community where youth work is increasingly constrained within the criminal justice system. We strongly believe that young people should not be criminalised before they are introduced to quality youth services. Youth justice plays an important role in our communities, but it must coexist with the core principles of youth work and street work that would allow each approach to complement the other.

Despite being a globally recognised practice, street work is still perceived in some contexts as radical or unconventional. We believe this perception needs to shift to allow for a more inclusive approach to youth work. In the past few years, our approach has demonstrated a positive impact not only on the young people we engage, but also on the broader community. We have proved our adapted and trauma-informed approach has enhanced a sense of feeling safer within our community. As we engage with young people in their space, we have created a more pro-social atmosphere locally and used our relationships to introduce many different agencies and events into our community that have never been there or have been missing for many years.

In the past two years, the community has witnessed some significant investments in our public parks and the facilities within them. We wholeheartedly welcome these investments but our observations paint a vivid and troubling picture of the social environment in west Tallaght, one where investments in infrastructure and facilities seem to be missing the deeper and more complex issues that affect families and young people. The physical improvements like playgrounds, BMX tracks and sports facilities are, in essence, a cosmetic approach, one that addresses the surface-level needs but fails to tackle the underlying issues that stem from intergenerational trauma, systemic marginalisation and the lack of trust in institutions. We need to start conversations about social infrastructures. Communities that feel left behind by the State, excluded from decision-making processes or underserved in terms of mental health, quality healthcare and educational and psychological assessments for children with learning differences often internalise feelings of worthlessness and frustration. This frustration can manifest in self-destructive behaviours like vandalising community spaces as a symbolic expression of their perceived place in society.

We have no doubt about this. In fact, we have proved it. When young people are nurtured in these spaces, the outcome for them and the community as a whole can be significant. As history shows us, creating these spaces without providing the services to support the community that uses them will result in the same old rhetoric we hear year after year. I am sure we have all heard it. We have heard it said that, "We built them playgrounds, they got the best of everything, and then they wrecked them." It is with great sadness that I can report some of these facilities are burning as we speak. It is clear to us that we are failing as a society to meet the needs of the communities that need the most.

Our work also gives us an opportunity to divert young men away from the clutches of organised crime and provide them with a temporary moment of refuge. I emphasise the word "temporary" because it is clear to us that these moments are short-lived and these vulnerable young men must return to an environment where they are dominated by older individuals whose only intention is to exploit them in the drugs trade. The issue of exploiting vulnerable children and young people for criminal purposes goes against what is promoted by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This explains that children and young people must be protected from exploitation and harmful situations. The current situation is having a knock-on impact on parents and siblings who live in terror as they are forced to pick up the pieces or assume responsibility for the inevitable time when an outstanding bill is owed. This rarely comes to the knowledge of the Garda because, out of fear and the natural instinct to protect the family member, the victim and their family can never step outside what we call the code of the street.

We also witness local services and volunteers fight tooth and nail to hold on to the little funding streams they have. This can create unhealthy competition between local organisations, which play an integral part in holding the community together and who can blame them? From the outside looking in, it looks like the community has self-sabotaged and maybe it has but we know the damage it causes is a true reflection of how it feels about itself.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I now invite Ms Kelly to make her opening statement.

Ms Brenda Kelly:

My name is Brenda Kelly and I am the senior alcohol and drugs youth worker at BeLonG To LGBTQ+ Youth Ireland. For over two decades, BeLonG To has supported and advocated on behalf of LGBTQ+ youth and offers the only dedicated drug and alcohol support service to support the needs of LGBTQ+ youth in Ireland. We welcome the opportunity to appear before the committee today and to share the experiences of LGBTQ+ young people relating to drug use.

We know from national and international research that LGBTQ+ youth report higher rates of drug use compared to the general youth population. The Being LGBTQ+ in Ireland research revealed that a combined 81% of LGBTQ+ young people aged between 14 and 24 had taken drugs - not for medical reasons - compared to 40% of the general youth population aged 12 to 25 in found by the My World study, which was commissioned by UCD and Jigsaw.

I will share with the committee some of the factors that contribute towards this rate of drug use among the young people with whom I work. Social rejection, discrimination and hate towards LGBTQ+ identities have a profound impact on the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth. Research tells us that drug use is used as a coping mechanism to manage mental health. Many studies highlight bullying, victimisation and a lack of social support in childhood as leading to higher rates of drug use among LGBTQ+ youth. Within the family home, negative reactions to coming out as LGBTQ+ and family rejection because of a young person’s identity strongly influence a young person’s drug use. According to research from BeLonG To, 56% of LGBTQ+ young people said they were not fully accepted in their home environment because of their identity. Among LGBTQ+ youth who had used drugs, 74% reported that their identity was not accepted at home. The LGBTI+ Life in Lockdown report also explored barriers faced by LGBTQ+ young people who wanted to access support related to their drug use. Negative past experiences with healthcare workers and service providers, often related to their LGBTQ+ identity, made youth nervous and reluctant to seek support. Location was also named as a barrier for LGBTQ+ young people living in remote and rural locations due to a lack of specialised drug services and LGBTQ+ support services. Stigma associated with addiction and drug use was also named as a personal barrier in accessing support.

Additionally, LGBTQ+ young people who had experienced homelessness in the past year were twice as likely to have used drugs than those in stable accommodation. Another study commissioned by Focus Ireland and BeLonG To found that many of the LGBTQ+ young people who reported using drugs had begun to do so or increased their use after becoming homeless.

I was compelled to apply for my role in BeLonG To through interactions with LGBTQ+ youth in my previous job at a homeless service. I want to tell the committee a story about young person named Tom. Tom is a 22-year-old gay man who was in active addiction and choose to sleep in the Merchants Quay Night cafe rather than homeless hostels because he did not feel safe in hostels. Tom was a member of the Traveller community and was ostracised by his family because he was a gay man. He had an addiction to crack cocaine and benzodiazepines. He struggled with internalised homophobia and carried a lot of shame because of his sexuality. He was not "out" to other service users due to fear of further isolation and abuse. When I began working in BeLonG To, Tom would occasionally present to the door and I would go down and chat to him. He would not come into the office or access our groups because he was ashamed of his addiction. Clearly, no one service can currently meet his needs. This shows us why we need to equip the wider drug sector with the capacity to support LGBTQ+ service users.

Tom is just one story but there are many more LGBTQ+ youth out there carrying shame and needing multidisciplinary support from a range of services to meet their intersectional needs. Through our programmes, services and inclusion training, we are striving to prevent drug misuse by creating safe and supportive spaces for LGBTQ+ youth. Our organisational stance on the decriminalisation of drug possession for personal use developed from the lived experience of a group of young LGBTQ+ people in the service. While discussing these experiences together, the young people in our service found that those from working-class areas were far more likely to be stopped and searched by An Garda Síochána than young people living in middle-class areas meaning that it was more likely for working-class LGBT+ youth to face a criminal conviction for drug possession.

As I have emphasised today, supports for the parents of LGBTQ+ youth are needed to reduce the rate of family rejection and isolation. Drug and alcohol workers, family support workers, social workers, social care workers and healthcare professionals need LGBTQ+ inclusion and awareness training to be able to meet the needs of their service users. On behalf of BeLonG To, I look forward to our discussion and hope that these insights prove useful.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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Our next speaker is Mr. Karl Ducque from Youth Workers Against Prohibition. I now invite Mr. Ducque to make his opening statement.

Mr. Karl Ducque:

I thank the Chair and members for the invitation. My colleague Eddie D'Arcy and I are here today on behalf of Youth Workers Against Prohibition. We came together in 2021 as a group of independent, experienced youth workers to raise our concerns about the policy of drug prohibition in Ireland. At present, youth workers are supporting over 380,000 young people in communities across the country. We see at first hand on a daily basis the untold damage that criminalising young people has on their life opportunities. We see the devastation that unregulated drugs are inflicting on communities as young people have no idea of the content, purity or consequences of what they are taking. Prohibition drives our young people who use drugs underground, isolates them and places them in danger. We believe that the policy of prohibition-criminalisation has failed and is not the way forward.

We fully support decriminalisation but we feel it does not go far enough to tackle the issue we see. Decriminalisation of all drug possession and cultivation for personal use is an important first step but it will still leave the supply of drugs in the control of criminal gangs and young people will still be at risk using unknown, unregulated substances. The time has come to regulate all drugs - not just caffeine, alcohol and tobacco - and to create a model that keeps our young people in Ireland safe. A model that protects people who use banned drugs from the present vagaries and removes the stigma for those who are affected by addiction, treating them instead with compassion and care, will keep our children and communities safer.

Under the current policy of prohibition, the drugs market is run by criminal gangs that operate through fear, intimidation and the exploitation of youth. Under prohibition, there is, and always will be, a thriving unregulated drug market and the longer we continue to hold on to the illusion of beating it, the longer we will have to see young people, families and communities suffer the consequences. Despite the record levels of seizures of drugs and drug money, there is no shortage of availability on the streets. Indeed, evidence indicates that tougher enforcement measures that disrupt the market by removing suppliers actually result in increased community tensions and violence as new suppliers take over. Drugs are so prevalent that young people find them easier to obtain than alcohol or cigarettes.

While the use of banned drugs is spread fairly evenly across all sections of society, in contrast drug law enforcement targets poor and disadvantaged users. Indeed, our prisons are full of young people from poor and disadvantaged communities caught up in the illegal drug trade. Their drug convictions condemn them to a lifetime of difficulty gaining employment, housing, community participation, insurance, relationships and travel. A total of 70% of the State's prison population, which currently stands at over 3,700 people, report having addiction issues. The figure for women is 85%. Our failed drugs policies impose devastation on disadvantaged communities and represent a bad investment for society as a whole. It costs in the region of €75,000 to imprison an adult for one year, while the cost for juveniles is €340,000. This is money that would be more effectively invested in community programmes to produce better outcomes for young people and society as a whole.

Defeating the drug gangs and ending their regimes of fear will only happen if we remove the lucrative drug market they thrive on by legally regulating all drugs. Contrary to popular belief, regulation does not introduce drugs to young people - those drugs are already just as available as alcohol and tobacco - and neither decriminalisation nor regulation result in increased drug use among young people. What drug reform does mean is that young people are not criminalised, are less likely to overdose, are less likely to be poisoned by contaminants and are more likely to seek help if they need it. Drug gangs do not ask for identification, do not practice quality control and do not necessarily care what happens to the people they have sold to.

Our primary motivation as youth workers is keeping young people safe and encouraging their development. Regulation will also help remove the shame and stigma that has for so long been associated with addiction and problematic drug use in this country. Among so many young people, addiction is a presenting problem but the real underlying issues that need to be addressed often precede drug use.

These can include deep-seated trauma such as physical and sexual abuse, exclusion from school, being looked after by the State, incarceration, poverty, neglect, disadvantage and isolation, self-harm and mental ill health, unmet learning difficulties and blocked futures. Prohibition adds new problems, compounds existing issues and captures these vulnerable young people in an underground web of crime. Our communities and young people deserve better than this outdated and woefully damaging system, which criminalises them, limits their future prospects and propels them into a cycle of addiction, debt and criminality.

There is evidence internationally. Portugal, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland and parts of the United States have seen the positive impact that taking an evidence-based approach to drug policy can have. In 2001, for example, Portugal decriminalised all drug possession and has since seen drug-related deaths remain below the EU average. The proportion of prisoners in Portugal sentenced for drug-related offences has fallen from 40% to 15% and rates of drug use have not increased, remaining consistently below the EU average. This has meant that the police and criminal justice system have more time and resources available to catch criminals. In 2018, Canada went one step further and legalised cannabis as opposed to simply decriminalising the drug. Canada did so for two main reasons: to reduce its availability to young people; and to destroy the illegal trade of the drug. Studies show that cannabis use among young people pre and post legalisation is down to 10% from 20% among those aged 15 to 17 years. Iceland has successfully delayed the onset of teenage drug and alcohol use by investing heavily in children and young people’s recreation during out-of-school hours. The Icelandic model did this by aligning policy, research and practice.

In line with this evidence, we believe that, after decades of harm caused by prohibition, it is vital we rethink our approach to the "war on drugs". Prohibition has been ineffective and devastatingly counterproductive for the communities where we work. Society would be best served by adopting an evidence-based drug policy that placed social care and public health, not the criminal justice system, at the heart of the governmental response. A responsibly regulated market and a health-led response to drug use will produce more informed individuals, stronger communities and healthier, happier families. This approach also recognises that drug addiction is rooted in traumatic adverse early childhood experiences and will be treated as such. Revenues from tightly controlled and regulated drug markets can be invested into community policing, public health campaigns, youth and community services, and evidence-based drug treatment. Continuing with the war on drugs is costly and ineffective and the human cost is too much to bear.

As a group, we recognise that this is a significant and drastic policy change, but after 50 years of devastating harm caused by prohibition, a move to evidence-based drug policies is long overdue. This move would help Ireland to be on the right side of history as the global shift away from prohibition gathers momentum. We are calling for all drugs to be regulated so that violent criminal gangs are put out of business and people who use drugs are safer from harm. We ask the committee to give this serious consideration. Communities and families cannot continue to be subjected to fear, crime and violence under the existing paradigm of prohibition. We need effective intervention and we need it now.

Mr. Thomas McCann:

I thank the committee for inviting me to present to it. It is good to see so many people who have been involved over the years in Traveller issues and supporting the Traveller community.

The Traveller community is one of the most disadvantaged groups in Ireland and has been for decades, if not centuries - in terms of unemployment, poverty, social exclusion, health status, infant mortality, life expectancy, illiteracy, formal education and mental health. The joint committee, which will meet later, acknowledged in its report that the Traveller community is suffering a mental health crisis due to many different factors. This is backed up by other statistics, such as the behaviour and attitudes survey, which found that 90% of Travellers were affected by mental health problems. Some 82% of Travellers have been affected by suicide, with 26% affected by suicide within their immediate family. I believe the figures are much higher now than they were when these statistics were collated in 2017. The all-Ireland Traveller health study, which was launched recently, indicated that 11% of all Traveller deaths were caused by suicide. There are more statistics to back this up. I will not go through them all.

The Traveller Counselling Service is involved in many initiatives, including counselling with Dóchas. More than half of the clients who present to us are suffering with addiction. Drug use within the Traveller community has become a significant issue in the past ten or 15 years. In the mid to late 1990s, a dipstick survey of Traveller drug use was done concerning serious drugs. A handful of Travellers were using addiction services. Now, more than 60% of people who present to addiction services are Travellers. This figure comes from reports and shows the increase in Traveller drug use. This is a high proportion compared with other drug users.

Aside from hard drugs, we also need to consider prescribed medications. There is an overprescription of medication in the Traveller community. Reports have shown this time and again. There are also drugs that are not taken into account in this discussion, such as nicotine and alcohol. We need to consider the whole spectrum of drug use.

As Mr. Collins stated, the rise in drug use is connected to a number of factors. Statistics show that there is more than 60% unemployment in the Traveller community, but the community believes this is much higher at 70% or 80%. There is also overcrowding and inadequate accommodation. For decades, local authorities did not draw down money from the Traveller accommodation budget. They have done so more recently, but most of that budget is being spent on refurbishments and not new builds. There is a lack of proper facilities in Traveller accommodation. The increase in homelessness adds to this scenario. There is limited access to education, particularly for younger Travellers. Mr. Brian Harvey produced a report showing the cuts in the Traveller sector since 2008. For example, Traveller training centres were all scrapped and there was nothing to replace them. All of those young people had nothing else to go back to. We can see the impact of this on younger Travellers alongside the systemic discrimination and racism experienced by Travellers in general.

Travellers face difficulties in accessing addiction services. For example, there is a lack of outreach in their communities. There needs to be an expansion of the one or two initiatives where there is engagement by addiction services with the community and supports can be linked into, be those detox or other services. The social determinants need to be examined. Younger people are falling into addiction because of a lack of support structures in terms of employment, education and training. The few small initiatives that are under way are welcome, but we need to do more. I welcome the National Traveller and Roma Inclusion Strategy II 2024-2028 – Deputy Stanton headed up the previous strategy and now a new one is in place – but it unfortunately does not mention anything about drug use. This is a gap. We need to ensure that there are targeted initiatives for Travellers. It has been shown time and again that, where it is part of a larger strategy, the Traveller community gets lost unless there are specific elements dealing with it and the playing pitch is levelled a little. A national drug strategy, addiction strategy or whatever we want to call it that focuses on the Traveller community and addresses some of the gaps is needed.

Otherwise we are going to fall behind and it is going to get worse. Unfortunately, that is the case.

There are a couple of things regarding resourcing for local and national Traveller organisations to address some of these issues. They are struggling for resources. As was said earlier, we need to support the development of proper strategies to engage with the community. We need the implementation of an ethnic identifier in all services provided to ascertain the level of engagement and issues people are coming in with across services. There are issues in some areas with that, however, we need development of culturally inclusive services, which is sadly missing from many services. That is not just addiction services, as we said, but also in the mental health and health services and others. There is a need for culturally appropriate and inclusive services to be developed. With regard to youth diversion programmes and so on, they need to be culturally appropriate. They need to be looked at through a culturally appropriate lens. It is not a one-size-fits-all for communities. We need to look at what the specific needs of different communities, including disadvantaged working-class communities because one size does not fit all.

We also want awareness programmes developed for and by the community. There are national and local groups trying to do this but it is difficult for them to address all the issues. While we are involved in counselling and mental health, we are also involved in a whole range of other issues, as are many other groups. They are struggling because there is a crisis within the community. There is not just one crisis but numerous crises. The drugs problem, however, is a crippling issue for the community. It was said that if the rise in the use of crack cocaine takes hold within the community, we could be looking at a similar issue to what happened to the north inner city when heroin first appeared, particularly among the Traveller community.

It is crucial that we take this on board and recognise there is a need for a specific targeted initiative that is addressed at a national level and brings all the players together, both the addiction services, the Traveller community and drug users to see how we can structure services that meet the needs of the community. I will leave it there and will answer any questions.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I thank Mr. McCann and all the witnesses for their opening statements. Each member has seven minutes and I will be strict on time. I ask members to keep it tight. Our first contributor is Deputy Stanton.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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I was not expecting to be first but I thank the Chair. I have another meeting at 10:30 a.m on the Traveller issues Mr. McCann referenced.

I have met many of the witnesses previously. They have painted a bleak picture but they also put forward solutions, suggestions and proposals that should be taken on board, at this stage, by the next Government in a very strong way. The witnesses have painted a very bleak picture of what is happening out there and what can happen, as Mr. McCann said, with respect to crack cocaine going forward. I do not want to sound in patronising in any way but I genuinely thank the witnesses for what their people are doing on the ground. I worked with Mr. D'Arcy before on the youth justice strategy. We want to ensure we have prevention and intervention services working together and appropriate intervention when it happens. Detention is the very last resort and this is working to some extent.

I am really taken with what Mr. Perth said with respect to working on the streets and intervening at that level. All the witnesses mentioned trauma and this has come up again and again. We have not focused enough on this issue in all its manifestations and what it means. In the very short time available to me, I want to give people an opportunity to elaborate on trauma. I acknowledge what the witnesses said about people coming out with their struggles and not being accepted and so on as well as the trauma that experienced there and how it has led people to turn to drugs as a way of relieving trauma. I have heard people say it again and again. We should start focusing on trauma as one area that has not been focused on as much as it should have been to date. We might tease out what it means and how we can help people experiencing trauma in all its manifestations.

The issue of decriminalisation has been dealt with here many times and our report recommends it. I visited Portugal many years ago and witnesses what people were doing there and engaged with them on this. I was convinced at the time that it had huge merit. I acknowledge what was said with respect to criminal gangs still being in charge and profiting where decriminalisation is involved. Legalisation and then regulation were mentioned but in an international context, you are still dealing with illegal substances being brought in from abroad and how a government deals with that. There are big issues there but the first step of decriminalisation of the person is an important one. It will be a huge step for Ireland if we go down that route. It will be a big move.

It was also said that Travellers more vulnerable to the illegal drugs market than others. The drugs issue permeates across all levels of society and that some people feeding this are well off and have really good employment. They are spending an awful lot of money on these substances. It might be much more than the people we see on the streets who are really struggling and are visible. There is a invisible market out there that is probably far more lucrative in many ways.

I would like to tease out the issue of trauma a little more. The witnesses might comment on that because we mentioned trauma without drilling down into what it actually means. We might have a few minutes for anyone who wants to come in on that.

Mr. Thomas McCann:

For the Traveller community, there is whole issue of intergenerational and family trauma relating to historical racism, exclusion and oppression, in particular, interventions by the State in assimilation policies and the denial of culture. We are now seeing the impact of the demonisation of Traveller culture and the attempt to eradicate Traveller culture, which has left a deep traumatic scar on the Traveller community. The exclusion and poverty that was created out of that and the hardship experienced by my own family and the wider Traveller community have left a deep traumatic impact on all of us, including myself.

Trauma and the denial and shame that comes from that was internalised by many children who went through the education system and were educated to conceal or get rid of their Traveller identity as well as all the Traveller children that were taken into care. That trauma has contributed to where we are now. The family trauma, alcoholism and drug use all contribute to where we are now. The last thing I will say is that services need to be trauma-informed. All services, including ourselves, need to have trauma-informed services and there is some good training available from Quality Matters and others. We need to look at that because we need to understand how that trauma is expressed in engagement in services.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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If we are going to make a change, such as decriminalisation of the person, we need to have serious service supports in place. Other jurisdictions did this and went down this road but they did not have youth workers, social workers, psychologists or addiction services in place to help people. That has to be a very important part of this. Would Mr. Perth like to come in on the subject of trauma? I am really keen to hear what he thinks.

Mr. Paul Perth:

I agree with the last speaker on trauma-informed services and I want to include the gardaí in that. Everybody working with the public needs to be trauma-informed and working through a trauma-informed lens.

May I just paint a quick picture of a night on street work? Probably two weeks ago, we went out with two artists and we were introducing them to some young people in the area. There is a new playground in west Tallaght, and when we walked in the artists counted 19 young people there from the ages of 8 to 11. It was dark. They were all playing together. Some of the stuff we picked up on - again, through a trauma-informed lens - was that it was quite volatile and there was gender-based violence. These are eight-, nine- and ten-year-olds. There was bullying, fear and intimidation. There was racism. We had to sit with a young Traveller girl, eight or nine years of age, and console her for 20 minutes. There was no regulation. The loudest and the strongest survive. That is what we encounter all the time when we allow young people just to play, coming from a trauma background and a background of addiction. Many of them come from backgrounds of addiction, poverty and deprivation. There is nobody there. I said it in the report. It is a cosmetic approach. The parks are fantastic, but when you allow these children just to walk into the park and play on their own, there is nobody there to nurture them or impose some kind of regulation. Those are the effects of trauma we are seeing.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I will ask Mr. D'Arcy to come in briefly and then bring him in again during-----

Mr. Eddie D'Arcy:

Most youth workers now adopt a trauma-informed approach. Deputy Stanton knows from his time in the Department of Justice that all young people who end up before the courts and incarcerated have come from a generation of trauma. They have all been excluded from school at an early age. They all have mental health issues and issues with exclusion, even within their own communities. This is something we are fairly aware of in trying understand how people might see us. There is a reason behind very challenging behaviour. If we are going to be able to manage it, obviously we need to understand the reasons for it. That is not an excuse for poor behaviour; it is an explanation for poor behaviour. Deputy Stanton is aware of that.

Mr. Thomas McCarthy:

I will say something about trauma briefly. There is a template for looking at these adverse childhood experiences, ACEs. The higher the number of ACEs you have, the more likely you are to become addicted to drugs, suffer from mental health, have poor health and end up in prison. Looking at a general family in a working-class community or a Traveller family, all those ACEs are met very quickly when you are quite young. In the Traveller community, for example, there is racism, a high level of bereavement, discrimination, poor living conditions and then the other pressures that are on the families. Then the children go to school and there is bullying, including racial bullying, and exclusion there. There is no one fighting their corner. The same happens in working-class communities, especially when there is addiction in the home or you are living in a block of flats. Even a neighbour's addiction can affect you. We have to think about it like that.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I thank Mr. McCarthy. Our next speaker is Deputy Crowe.

Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)
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The witnesses are all very welcome. I have dealt with many of them over the years in the context of some of the work they are doing. They led off this morning by speaking about the scale of the challenge we face. I think it was Mr. Collins who said that he has not seen the situation on the ground as bad as it is now. I think that is a common view. The witnesses sit on drugs task forces. I think that is the view of people there. I know some of them over the years from different work.

Back in the nineties, we were trying to deal with joyriding. That was a big challenge . It is still a challenge in some areas today. Scrambler bikes are probably the big challenge in some of our parks now. We tried to set up in Killinarden at that time a group called the cop on group. It was basically trying to get young people at risk involved, what we are talking about here today. We identified at that time that these young people were probably going to end up in the justice system, were going to end up possibly on drugs or would probably end up in criminality or whatever else. Many of them are dead; they are no longer with us. It was unsuccessful, but there was a group in Ballyfermot at the time, We Have a Dream. We were based on that model. We were trying something different with very little resources and very little support. I do not really see much difference today as regards a lot of the work the witnesses are doing. Again, we are scrambling around for funding and trying to get support. I do not get the sense that the scale of the problem is understood in here. I got elected first in 2002. I do not believe there is any real understanding of the scale of the challenge facing communities. Some politicians and some communities live in a bubble in that this does not affect them. In parts of my constituency, the difference is between day and night as regards the challenges people face. Mr. Perth talked about the situation with people in poverty. It is a right of passage in parts of my constituency, the norm, that you go on to third level education. At the other end, it might be 5% or 6% of people, maybe 10% in some estates but even less in some groups, that go on to college. There is that challenge.

One of the things we probably need to address here is the funding model. If we are grasping every year for funding, we are on a losing wicket. As regards the scale of the challenge, I think there is a huge amount of data out there. I know some of the witnesses are saying we need to modernise, but how many more reports do we need to keep writing on these issues, on the challenge?

I will give the committee an example. Some of them talked about suicide. On Saturday, in Tallaght village, there was a young man in a block of flats - there is a picture of him there now - and gardaí were trying to talk him down. If he did come down, he would probably have broken a leg or something like that. He was taken to Tallaght hospital. He signed himself out and tried again. The third time, he threw himself off a bridge. He is no longer with us. The first step in Tallaght village was a cry for help. The supports were not there, and that was another one lost. Again, some of the witnesses talk about the number of suicides they come across with their various groups and so on. There would have been spikes in that regard, and that has been going up and down. Again, some of it is related to trauma. The witnesses have talked about that. Some of it is related to the lack of supports and the frustration of young people who cannot articulate themselves. No one seems to be listening.

I started off by speaking about how we are trying things differently, trying to do different things. One of the key things is the street work, that we are actually getting out of the community centres, where before we were always trying to bring young people in. Now, clearly, we need to go out and talk to them because there was always a cohort of young people who would not join the club. You always wondered, if they joined the club, would we be successful?

I have not asked the witnesses any questions. I am conscious that there is a huge challenge as regards funding. What do they feel in that regard? Do they think that we, as politicians, get the challenges that are faced out there? Third, if they had a magic wand, what would they do? Ours is a very rich country. We keep being told that there is €23 billion-plus in the coffers. Is that being reflected in the witnesses' communities?

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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Mr. D'Arcy and Mr. Collins, did you want to come in?

Mr. Eddie D'Arcy:

I have been a youth worker for over 40 years. The same as everybody else at the table, I have probably spent all my life trying to divert young people away from criminality, from engaging in antisocial behaviour and from involvement in drugs. You are successful with some of the individual young people you work with, but there is this overwhelming sense that the numbers involved that you need to be supporting are just enormous. All we are really doing is putting a sticking plaster on this. I was in Neilstown with my initiative when Deputy Crowe was in Killinarden with his group. The difficulty for me is that the reasons why young people are vulnerable, fall out of school, get into trouble with the law and get involved in drugs and alcohol are structural. We could get all the money in the world, but all we are trying to do is repair and support young people being damaged by the structures that are there.

That is why I am really interested in trying to see some legislative change that might change how we approach the drug issue, how we support young people and change the education system because the education system in Ireland is probably one of the most unfair systems in the whole of Europe. Take a young fellow from the Oliver Bond flats with a project I am involved in now. He is competing with a youngster going to Blackrock College in the same exam to get the same number of points and he has absolutely none of those resources, yet we say we have a great education system here. The level of inequality is so considerable that we are, to an extent, fighting a losing battle. Yes, we all need more resources. If you take our project in the south-west inner city, the number of youth workers we have compared with the number of young people in the area is tiny. It is minimal. How can we have an impact on the Oliver Bond, James’s Street, Basin Lane and Marrowbone Lane flats with a handful of youth workers when so many of the children and young people in those flats have experienced difficulty and trauma because of historical drug issues from within that community? Yes, we want the extra resources but we also desperately need considerable structural change to create a much more equal society in which all young people are equally valued. That obviously includes young Travellers, young people who are gay and lesbian but also young people coming from those impoverished societies where they do not have any real opportunities and the only opportunity that is presenting in their face is the criminal gang because it is instant money and instant protection from violence and gives them status with a certain cohort in that community. We are allowing that to happen and the only consequence is we are actually criminalising thousands of young men and women every year. In 1975, when I started as a youth worker, there were 750 adults in prison in Ireland and now we have 5,000. The vast majority are there because of their involvement in the drug trade or because of their own drug use. That system is just not working. They get a permanent sentence. As Senator Ruane will tell you, you can forget about our own legislation around spent convictions; it does not exist. Even if Mr. Perth gets a volunteer in west Tallaght to get involved in his local football club and that guy had a drug conviction ten years ago, he will not get his Garda vetting to be able even to contribute positively to his own community. There are so many elements of legislation that make it so difficult for us that we need change. I think the Deputy is right. Maybe the people sitting in this House do not really fully understand that.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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Will Mr. Ducque come in very briefly?

Mr. Karl Ducque:

I know the young person Deputy Crowe was speaking about. It is another family devastated because of a young person not getting the response they needed. He had been suffering psychosis for the last two years and had not been getting the treatment that he needed. It is one reason I am sitting here, to be honest. It is because I have seen so many friends dying over the years. Now I am a youth worker and I am out on the street like Mr. Perth. I am engaging with young people. They have to be involved in criminal activities, drug dealing or selling or be affected by it, for me to engage with them. I am just following up what Mr. D’Arcy said. The resources are there and we are engaging with young people but we are firefighting out there at the moment. We are on the street and building relationships with young people for years. We are getting them out of the drugs trade, sending them to college and getting them the treatment they need but you go back the next day and there are two new young people replacing them. It is about the bigger picture. It is the policies. It is the trauma they are experiencing. It is what Mr. Perth talked about – that intergenerational trauma of the areas where we are where drugs are creating these subcultures all over the country. People are going to prison, the kids are being neglected, they are not going to school and leaving early. It is constant. Something bigger has to change more than just working individually with these youth workers firefighting.

The levels of burn-out youth workers are experiencing at the moment is shocking.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I will prioritise Mr. Collins in the next part, if that is okay. I now call Deputy McAuliffe.

Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)
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I thank everyone for coming in. We are always trying to use our time in the meeting. We are here to do a body of work. Sometimes for us it can be frustrating revisiting topics such as the impacts of poverty, intergenerational trauma and the concentration of this in disadvantaged communities. The reason it can be frustrating is because many of the people who are here at this committee are here because these are the issues we want to progress and so on. One half of us is thinking about how we want to address those issues and not just restating them but by the same token, the reality is that many of those issues do not get the attention in this House or the country because they do affect a minority of people and there can never be enough opportunities to restate those issues. I just want to acknowledge that. Many people in this room understand many of the things that the witnesses have spoken about because most of us have lived experience or been educated by many of the groups in our areas about those issues. I acknowledge the youth services and drugs task force in my area, which are fantastic at feeding that stuff in to us and trying to convert it into a policy.

I will focus on some more detailed questions. It is not that I do not understand the issues which Mr. D’Arcy raised but I want to focus on more detailed questions about how this committee might make further recommendations to tackle them.

On youth justice and the youth justice project, many youth programmes are funded by youth justice or the UBU. There has been some expansion in youth justice lately. Locally we had an extra eight or ten youth workers in that sector but we have not seen the UBU expand. First, will the witnesses talk about the pressures on different youth services in balancing those two streams? Second, will they talk about the practicalities of dealing with a young person where the use of drugs is an issue? I am thinking of people who are referred to a youth justice project because there might have been drug use or some very low level of involvement in the drugs trade. What actually happens to that young person? What work can the youth services do with them? How might criminal sanctions play a part in restricting the work of youth services? How can youth services work with and advocate on behalf of that young person?

Mr. Eddie D'Arcy:

I will take the UBU question. There are two difficulties with the UBU for us. They have to be labelled before we are allowed work with them which in effect is a negative thing for those young people. They have to be labelled as a Traveller, early school leaver or a young mother, for example. To me that is a difficulty initially. On the terms of the funding, the Deputy’s Government recently made the decision that it will set aside €1.2 million for ten new UBUs. That works out at €120,000 per new project. I know every single project under Youth Work Ireland and many of the projects in Dublin have signed up to say they will not tender for those projects because the level of money is completely and totally ridiculous. The Government is setting the project up to fail from day one. In fact, we would prefer if the money was used to bolster the existing projects. The letter that went out under which they were set out initially was far too tight and many of the projects are really struggling financially. On UBU, it is important there is a system there to fund the youth projects on the ground but there has to be realistic funding. We are all professionals. We all do our degree in college and we come to work in a very difficult sector. We work unsociable hours. The level of funding there does not pay us anywhere like as if we were working for the State.

Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)
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That has an impact on retention and recruitment.

Mr. Eddie D'Arcy:

Yes, retention and recruitment. There are no pensions or anything like that. I do not want to get into a trade union thing-----

Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)
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I hear Mr. D’Arcy there.

Mr. Eddie D'Arcy:

-----I am just saying those are the problems with the UBU at the moment: first is the labelling and second the level of funding per project is way too inadequate.

Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)
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The question was about youth justice and that project.

Mr. Thomas McCarthy:

I will say something on that.

Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)
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Are there any organisations that are funded by youth justice?

Mr. Karl Ducque:

For ourselves, it is the criteria you need for youth justice. We have criteria as part of the targeted response with youth programme but the Solas Project also has a project called Rua. It is the referral process. The young person has to be so far gone that mainstream youth services will not engage with him or her, so he or she will be already too far gone before we can even engage with them. You need to lift the criteria and look at the referral pathways in. We do not use referral pathways. We use self-referral. We build relationships on the street with the young people where if they want to work with us that is fine. Some of them will turn around and say “Fuck off. I don’t want to do anything with you”.

This goes down to addiction services as well. There are people dying out there who would go into an addiction service tomorrow but they do not fit the criteria because they are still on street drugs, smoking weed or whatever.

Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)
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In theory, the UBU project is for general youth work and the youth justice system is for more targeted youth work. On young people being referred to services through the Garda referral process, what is Mr. Ducque's experience of criminal association with addiction or involvement in the sale or distribution of drugs? How does that get in the way of working with young people? Does it get in the way?

Mr. Karl Ducque:

Yes, of course it does. They could be too far gone. I engaged with one guy and asked him to tell me truth about how much he was making. He told me he was making €2,500 a day. I am there to offer him an apprenticeship where he will get €300 or €400 a week. What are you going to do? I feel there is a gap in youth work with these young people. Something shifts in their lives. They may pick up too many charges and the youth worker is there-----

Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)
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They are picking up too many charges.

Mr. Karl Ducque:

Yes, and the youth worker is there to support them through that process. There is a shift in their lives and youth workers are there. I asked this guy what was the most he had made in one day. He said it was €5,000. He had made €5,000 in one day and I am there trying to get him into college or an apprenticeship or something. We never had a hierarchy or drug dealers telling us to get away from people because they were their workers. We know some youth workers who have experienced that but it has never happened to me.

Mr. Thomas McCarthy:

On youth justice, there are criteria for the normal youth justice projects and then there are criteria for the likes of Mr. Ducque's project, which are at a much higher level. In a normal youth justice project, there are five or six criteria you have to meet. It is more of a caution-based system. If you get a caution from the Garda, you can go into a youth justice project. Mr. Ducque's project is for people who are in the courts system and who have been charged. That is the difference between the Garda diversion programmes and the youth justice programmes.

Mr. Paul Perth:

It is also about the language we use. Coming from the street work background, many people tell us what we are doing is great and that we are getting young people off the street. That is a misconception. We are actually working with people on the streets. As a sector, we need to look at the language we use. We forget that. Mr. Whiteley is always in my ear about this. Young people have rights. We talk about their needs all of the time but we forget about their rights. They have the right to hang around the shops or to be in the park. Somebody needs to be in there nurturing, regulating and all of this type of stuff. I will give a real-life example of a guy we work with. We started an initiative called Run with Rob because Mr. Whiteley is a runner. He might talk about it later on but loads of stuff is happening within that. It is not about running.

Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)
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It is an opportunity to engage.

Mr. Paul Perth:

It is a tool of engagement. We had 12 guys from west Tallaght going to a Jigsaw event in Bray, which was a run and a swim. All of these young people would be deemed "at risk". That is a term I do not like. On the way over, one of the guys stopped at a shop in Bray. He got nicked and was brought straight to the station. Of course, we rang the station. He went to court the next day. He was taken out of court for contempt of court because he was trying to explain to the judge that he was trying to get his head together and was in Bray for a run with Jigsaw and the Connect 4 Project when he was taken off the street. He had no understanding. He was trying to get his head together. That is a direct impact of how we grew up in society, the world he grew up in and having picked up charges. He was trying to do something positive. He could not understand. He ended up having an argument with the judge. The judge was obviously right; he had to face the consequences. However, he was taken off a mental health run and swim in the sea. That is what is happening and it is only one example. I could sit here all day and give millions more.

Mr. Robert Whiteley:

I work with Mr. Perth as a street worker in the Connect 4 Project. In my experience, for many of the young people we meet, the damage is unfortunately already done as a result of years of trauma and stuff they have inherited from their siblings, mothers and fathers. On the groups we work with out in Tallaght, I will talk a bit about the Run with Rob initiative. We basically took a group of young men from Tallaght, the lads who hang around hotspots and so on, and used physical activity as a tool of engagement to get them involved in positive initiatives with us. I am a bit lost for words.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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You are all right. I will let you in during the next part. Senator Ruane probably has a few questions. It sounds like a great initiative.

Lynn Ruane (Independent)
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I thank the witnesses very much for their presentations. Obviously, 90% of those here are men. That is usually seen as a negative thing but it is a very positive thing when it comes to working with young men, especially in the communities we work in. It is especially positive to see working-class men who are experts not only because of their profession and education, but because of their experience and real understanding of the situations of some of the people they work with, especially on the streets. I can gush over the Connect 4 Project because it is not my electorate, but my community. I am therefore looking at it as a person who lives there. When I go out onto the streets, I see the lads going on runs with the project and I watch that elastic band, whatever it is called, being put up on the trees and the little girls doing the tightrope stuff. What is it called?

Mr. Paul Perth:

It is a slackline.

Lynn Ruane (Independent)
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These are really simple tools but they bring many people in. It is really amazing work. Mr. Ducque has spoken about people possibly being too far gone and has asked how you can compete with a wage of €2,500. You cannot. What are the witnesses' thoughts on that point? There is a tension between social policy and legal policy. There is then another piece in between, an intervention in the moment to reduce harm. I see potential for the different groups' work in that space between those two pieces. It is a question of what an intervention looks like in the moment. It may be a matter of deciding that we are not competing with the drug trade. It is usually the case that a small percentage of people in a community create the most harm and make people feel unsafe. It is often a reduction in violence that people are looking for rather than competition with the drug trade. At what point do you switch away from the apprenticeship and college stuff and look at how to just reduce violence and harm while acknowledging that the drug trade, which we do not like, is happening? What are the alternatives in that space when you cannot go with the college or apprenticeship piece? I am not talking about giving up on anyone but about working with what you are dealt in the moment. Perhaps the witnesses could discuss that.

I may then ask Ms Kelly to come in. I am not sure the committee has had any real conversations around chemsex. There is nothing on it in the report so far. I hope we will get to it in the end. Will Ms Kelly give some insights into chemsex and the harms that causes as regards addiction and people availing of services? Those are my two points.

Mr. Paul Perth:

I will just jump in really briefly. I thank the Senator very much. To go back to that incident earlier with the 18 or 19 young people in the park and the chaos, being able to go into the park and sit with young people in their space rather than forming a group or asking them to come in allows for an equal balance of power. We ask if there is any chance that we can come into their space. We ask them for permission. Two siblings aged ten and 11 were probably the main instigators of that chaos, bullying and violence. It sounds horrible. We had two artists with us. We restored order.

We got them going the same way up and down the track. We got them talking to each other. There was respect between genders and stuff like that. We did all the youth work process but these two boys, the two main instigators, followed us over. They wanted to show us this wall because the artists were doing spray painting. They said they would show us the wall. On the way over, through conversation, those two guys started telling us about collecting bottles. They had four or five bottles, which was verified after. They were not spoofing. They had four or five black bags of bottles out the back garden that they were collecting - and I am going to use their language - for the local druggies who cannot get off drugs and who were going on walks. That was their language. It was the local walk-and-talk group. What it exposed to us was the values within those two young people. Like Eddie - and I am not as old as Eddie - I am around a long enough time to know where those two young men are heading: criminal justice, youth justice, Oberstown and on and on. Those two guys need to be nurtured at source. The value systems they have, where they are collecting bottles, need to be nurtured and brought to the fore. That is the way we are going to save - not save, but direct and divert these young people. At source, go into the playground, sit with them and nurture them.

Ms Brenda Kelly:

I thank Senator Ruane for the question. It is really important that chemsex is brought into this discussion but it is important to say it is not the only element we are talking about when we are talking about drugs and alcohol as regards the LGBT community. For anyone who does not know - I am not sure, you probably do - chemsex is when predominantly gay men get together, take drugs and engage in sexual activity. These parties can last for days and they are usually in the one apartment or one room, taking drugs and having sex. There are high rates of sexual abuse that happen at these parties, and sexual assaults. I am just going to refer to them as men because, in my experience, I have only supported men. It is always men who have been engaging. It is often the only connection these men have to their community or other people.

I worked in the Merchants Quay needle exchange. That is where I would have done most of my work with men who have been engaging in these chemsex parties. It is very similar to the reasons I highlighted in my opening statement on why LGBTQ+ people would use drugs: social rejection, isolation and family rejection. They are coming to an exchange and their eyes are on the ground. They cannot look at you. They are carrying so much shame. Their intersectional needs are crazy. They are one of the most vulnerable cohorts I have worked with and one with the most complex needs. I was just saying prior to the meeting that, when I was working in the exchange, even the lack of training that staff received on the matter was shocking.

In the Merchants Quay night café too, we would have gay men coming in who would stay awake in the night café because they would not feel safe in other hostels, similar to Tom, who I spoke about in my opening statement. They would speak to you throughout the night about the trauma they faced at these parties. They face serious sexual assaults at these parties, and they are not looking for support due to the discrimination they faced in other services. I am currently not supporting anyone engaging in the chemsex scene in my current role in BeLonG To. I think that could, first, be due to age, as I only work up to 24-year-olds, but also the complex needs and the internalised shame that they carry. I think they are reluctant to come to BeLonG To as an LGBT service for that support.

I would suggest, if the committee wants to go deeper into the topic of chemsex, that there is - I call him the king of chemsex - Graham in the Rialto Community Drug Team, and he is a wizard on all things chemsex. I do not feel right in talking on the matter too much when there is an expert out there who can do a lot better than me.

Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the witnesses. I am substituting for my colleague an Teachta Thomas Gould. My first question, and this will probably will not surprise Mr. Perth, is for Connect 4. I was able to watch a bit on screen but also read the submissions. I was struck when the perception of self-sabotage of the area was spoken about. Perhaps Mr. Perth could talk about how young people's perception of their area influences how they view their future and how those things are interconnected.

Mr. Paul Perth:

Going back to what I read out earlier about the cosmetic approach, there are millions being spent in west Tallaght, and indeed across the country, on playgrounds, BMX tracks and all this type of stuff we mentioned earlier. We would definitely see this as a cosmetic approach. With regard to young people coming from houses where there is domestic abuse and sexual violence, they are real-life. It was asked earlier if politicians understand. I remember being here last year and talking to a couple of politicians, saying it is Christmas on 25 December and parents of 13-, 14- and 15-year-olds let their children smoke weed for a couple of different reasons. It regulates them, their siblings and their home. They get up in the morning and go to school. They are able to sleep. We understand that, as youth workers. I am sure everyone here understands that, but with regard to the politicians, one of them stopped me two minutes later and said, "Do you realise what you just said there?" I did not understand why he was shocked, and I was shocked that he was shocked.

To answer the Deputy's question, I do not know whether I can explain properly what we face daily with regard to the level of poverty. Addiction to crack cocaine is rampant out there. I do not like to bring it into this House. I invite anybody to come out with us or Karl, do some street work with us and walk the streets in Mac Uilliam.

This time last year, there was a place up in west Tallaght that I am sure is mirrored around the country. The grass was a foot and a half high and they were playing football in it with the nitrous oxide canisters that are probably a foot. They were using them as goalposts. We were looking around asking what was going on there. Where are all the services? Why are we not working together? Why is the grass not cut? Why are there are not football pitches there? It is so easy to turn this place from an antisocial space that nobody wants to go to to a prosocial space. It was done probably within three weeks. That is mirrored all over west Tallaght.

Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein)
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I thank Mr. Perth for that. For the broader witnesses, my understanding is that the committee has agreed that public consumption of drugs cannot be allowed to increase, as we have heard from other jurisdictions that this has huge impacts when they decriminalise drugs. How can we control public consumption without further stigmatising the people the witnesses are working with? How can those two things be married?

Mr. Eddie D'Arcy:

Decriminalisation means different things to different people. We have to be very careful as we go down that route. Decriminalisation is not necessarily about increasing or decreasing the number of young people or people in general using drugs. In fact, many of us would say that everybody in Ireland who wants to smoke weed is probably smoking weed. There might be 10% who are a bit worried because they are a school principal or they work in the Department of Justice and if they get caught, it would have repercussions for their job.

Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein)
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I agree.

Mr. Eddie D'Arcy:

Most people living in the Deputy's constituency, and I happen to live in her constituency at the moment, who smoke weed know that, realistically, no one is going to raid their house. They know, realistically, they are not going to get stopped on the street or stopped in their nice car and searched for drugs. If they are under the influence and get stopped, that is a different thing. All the conversation here today, and rightly so, has been about the areas probably impacted most by the drug gangs, poverty and the reasons those people go into drugs. We have to remember the vast majority of people who use drugs in Ireland are from outside of those communities. They are buying and using them and maintaining their lifestyle the way it is.

If we are going to decriminalise, we have to be very careful because there are a couple of unseen consequences we have to think about. For some people, decriminalisation is the Portuguese model where the drugs are still illegal but instead of a criminal response, you will get a civil response which is that you must attend a drug treatment centre. I am responsible for a drug treatment centre out in the Chair's patch, CASP. We are a one-stop for all. I am really proud of the fact that if someone rings us, within 24 hours, they will be seen by a project worker. It is great. It is a response that is ready for someone when they are at the point where they need help and they want to get help. It is not a three-week or a four-week wait. If I had to suddenly respond to thousands of people who gardaí have stopped for simple possession, and they are told they have to attend a treatment centre within a fortnight-----

Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein)
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It would be overwhelmed.

Mr. Eddie D'Arcy:

-----or they are going to be before the courts, it is not going to work. It is just ridiculous.

My other huge concern is that many people who purchase drugs do not particularly like the fact they are purchasing from a criminal gang, but they do not have an alternative. At the moment, if we say we are going to decriminalise and simple possession will no longer be a criminal offence - whether there is any other consequence does not really matter at the moment - people will still have to buy drugs from a criminal gang. I cannot get my head around how that makes sense. We are almost further legitimising the role of the gang in certain communities, which is something I really worry about.

I live in Deputy O'Reilly's constituency and I am reasonably well known; my hobby is running a local football club. I get quite a few phone calls from people in the Swords-Malahide area whose kids owe a lot of money. They do not have any local resources they can go to and they do not know anybody. They call me and ask what I think they should do. They are paying out big amounts because that intimidation and fear is now beginning to spread. I know it sounds horrible, but I am glad it is, because now maybe the rest of Ireland is beginning to become aware of what it is like in some of the communities we work in. Decriminalisation is not necessarily about reducing the number of people who take drugs. I do not think it is going to massively increase the numbers, but it might decrease the harm drugs do, particularly in communities where drug gangs are rampant.

Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein)
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Specifically regarding public consumption and the way that can be managed, my understanding is the committee had agreed that an increase in public consumption should not necessarily be a by-product. How can that be done without further stigmatisation, however? We spoke about stigma and trauma. How can that be done without heaping further stigma on communities that do not need it and cannot cope with it?

Mr. John Paul Collins:

I wanted to respond to a question asked by Deputy Crowe. For anyone who does not remember the Copping On project and the training that followed it in the late nineties, there are a few things I want to say. With regard to Mr. Perth's response, resources are one thing. This is not our first rodeo in terms of committees such as this one and trying to influence legislative change because there is a need. Resources can only do so much. Legislative change and a new approach are needed because the status quo is not working and it has not worked for many years in the work we do. Targeted approaches are needed. We are workers on the ground and we know what works. We need support to row in behind us in terms of legislative change and resourcing it to make it happen, as such.

I want to come back to Deputy Crowe on how normalised drug use is becoming within the community, particularly within the Traveller community. As I said earlier, there is drug use at a level that has not been there before, particularly among females within the community. A key role has not been seen to an extent in terms of drug-dealing within the Traveller community on halting sites which is linked to very prominent mainstream gangs. Along with that comes a high level of drug-related intimidation. There is a number of things that need to be done. Resources, of course, is one of them, but how those resources are used in terms of trying to develop responses to the issues on the ground is key. As I said earlier, the status quo is not working.

Mr. Thomas McCann:

The SAOL project and a number of others were involved in getting the stories of ordinary people from ordinary communities involved. Those stories need to be heard by this committee. The stories of disadvantaged communities, of Travellers and others need to be allowed in because statistics can numb us to the reality of people's lives in places like this. It is important.

There are three areas where change is needed. The first is structural change, which has already been mentioned, in terms of systemic racism, inequality, exclusion, poverty and the lack of educational opportunity in disadvantaged communities, including Traveller communities. We need proper investment in communities in terms of infrastructure and sports facilities, as was said. We also need proper infrastructure in youth services. The involvement of communities as stakeholders in the process is important, because a lot of reports and strategies are developed but do not have any weight because, a lot of the time, the people in the communities are not seen as stakeholders in the process and there is no proper investment. Those are the three areas that need to be looked at. If they are combined and there is collaboration between the services, the State and the communities, we can begin to move things on. Those are certainly what I see as the key issues.

Mr. John Paul Collins:

If a person's lived experience is one of racism, discrimination, substance misuse in the home or domestic violence, there needs to be a community development response to it. The response needs to be developed within the community and resourced. It is as simple as that. It cannot come from the top down. It is impossible. It has not worked, and it will not work.

Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party)
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To respond to Mr. D'Arcy's point about decriminalisation, any time we make a suggestion to change the law there is concern on this side of the room about unintended consequences or what it would look like. Professor Comiskey, who appeared before the committee a couple of weeks ago, stated her understanding of the research is that more progressive laws do not necessarily increase use and more draconian laws do not decrease use, because people use drugs. I wanted to make that point.

I want to hear some of the experiences on the ground, especially in a specific area. In recent weeks, we have heard from a number of clinical or medical service providers, whom I know the witnesses meet tangentially every so often when someone is in crisis. I will start with Ms Kelly. Some of the research suggests that stigma does not stop at the door of a hospital or a service and that, in some cases, the stigma can be higher among healthcare staff. One of the examples given was that drug and addiction services are not even subject to inspection because it is a totally different stream of service. What are the witnesses' experiences of dealing with someone in crisis and enabling that person to access clinical help? Is stigma experienced within the health system?

Ms Brenda Kelly:

I touched on this in my opening statement. We did research on LGBTQ+ mental health throughout lockdown. Part of it looked at the barriers LGBTQ+ people face when accessing supports. One of the main findings was that when a person presented to services, such as drug services - some of our school research shows it is similar among teachers as well - they are experiencing further homophobia, transphobia and biphobia from workers in the services. That is something we in Belong To have seen in all sectors, the medical profession included. The current drugs strategy recommends the need for specialised referrals for LGBTQ+ people and marginalised communities, which would refer them to services such as the one I provide as a specialised drugs and alcohol worker for LGBT people. I agree with these specialised services. If I did not, I would be contradicting my whole role.

I also think it is just as important that staff in mainstream services, more traditional drugs and alcohol services and medical services, have the capacity, knowledge and skills to support LGBTQ+ people and other marginalised communities and that their policies, programmes and practices are all inclusive for the LGBTQ+ experience. To answer Deputy Hourigan's question, that is definitely something I have experienced and have heard from young people I have supported.

Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party)
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Anyone else? We have heard stories about people finding it difficult to get a GP specifically.

Mr. John Paul Collins:

There is no question about that. Deputy Hourigan might have heard the input earlier in the meeting. It is not just Traveller organisations or other services in it. The All-Ireland Traveller Health Study reported that ten out of 12 healthcare professionals admitted anti-Traveller racism and discrimination existed in their service. There is evidence to prove this is taking place across the services. Obviously if it is happening within the wider health services, it is happening within drug and alcohol services too. There is no question about that. For example, even though we work very closely with a particular service, an issue arose in respect of racism and discrimination towards a Traveller man in that service.

That man, due to the treatment he received, removed himself from one of the services we work very closely with. There is no doubt it does take place and is happening. It is one of many barriers to Travellers, in particular, accessing services.

Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party)
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He just decided to opt out because he could not be treated with dignity.

Mr. John Paul Collins:

Absolutely.

Mr. Thomas McCarthy:

We hear stuff like that in Pavee Point-----

Mr. John Paul Collins:

On a regular basis.

Mr. Thomas McCarthy:

-----due to treatment. In homeless services in particular, there can be quite a lot of discrimination. Obviously, Travellers tell us all the time that there is discrimination in the local GPs, in the casualty wards, in the hospitals - everywhere.

Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party)
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I presume the outcome of that is, again, a removal of yourself from the situation or a failure to engage when you probably need it most.

Mr. Thomas McCarthy:

Even in the data, we are seeing a higher number of Travellers who are not following through with treatment. They are having an initial assessment but they are not following through. We see a higher level in the Traveller community. That is coming across in the data.

Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party)
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Am I right in thinking, just having sat on the task force a few times, that one of the answers to this is peer support, namely, that people would have a health advocate to sit with them and bring them back? In Mr. McCarthy's experience, is that something that works?

Mr. Thomas McCarthy:

Yes, we are always arguing for peer workers in the Traveller communities, particularly around addiction services. The level of addiction versus the level of recovery is a problem because we do not have that many people in recovery.

Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party)
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There are not enough people.

Mr. Thomas McCarthy:

We do not really have those peers really. We do not have enough people in recovery. The drug addition is so entrenched and the drug users are so far away from the support. We talk about people being hard to reach. Traveller drug users are not coming in. That is the issue.

Mr. John Paul Collins:

What is proven is that peer support works in the Traveller community. In that regard, looking at the peer support model, we currently have a pilot running in north Dublin between Coolmine, HSE CHO 9, ourselves and then local Traveller organisations in Blanchardstown, Finglas and TravAct in Coolock, where we have two peer support workers with lived experience employed as part of the wider team of five.

Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party)
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I am always the boring person who says it is really cost-effective.

Mr. John Paul Collins:

It absolutely is.

Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party)
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It is just somebody who rings you up, reminds you not to forget about your appointment and walks in with you.

Mr. Thomas McCarthy:

There are pilots like this that happen, but for us it is just not replicated.

Mr. John Paul Collins:

That is the problem.

Mr. Thomas McCarthy:

They are not replicated and they are not expanded across the different CHO areas. You might have a really good initiative in one place and then in another place with a high level of Travellers, such as Tallaght, there will not be another initiative like that.

Mr. Paul Perth:

There are also huge levels of exclusion of people coming under the umbrella of neurodiversity when they are looking for some kind of treatment in terms of drugs service. This leads to anyone who may be presenting and saying they are bipolar or who might have some other underlying issue being excluded from a drugs service. We are finding that really difficult to link people in.

Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party)
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When that happens, in Mr. Perth's experience, what is the language that is used? Is it said the people need to go and get treatment for bipolar first?

Mr. Paul Perth:

Yes. They say "we do not provide a service for that" and they are completely excused.

Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party)
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It is that dual diagnosis thing that they just will not do it.

Mr. Paul Perth:

People are told to move on. We are left as youth workers then, as I sure everybody else is, to hold that person.

Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party)
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Am I right in thinking that if people go in somewhere with bipolar or whatever it might be to ask for treatment, they will often be told they need to get clean first?

Mr. Paul Perth:

Absolutely, yes.

Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party)
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It is a catch-22.

Mr. Thomas McCarthy:

I will give a very quick example. A nephew of a friend of mine cut his wrists and threw himself off a balcony a few weeks ago. He went to the casualty ward, obviously. His wrists were nearly cut right to the bone and he had thrown himself over a balcony. He got let out of the casualty ward. They had to take him to the house just to keep him safe. They let him out of the casualty ward and gave him an appointment for a psychologist two days later or something. He went to the psychologist who had a conversation with him. He told the psychologist he was smoking weed in a vape and he was told he needed to get off the vape first. He definitely should have gone in somewhere, 100%.

Mr. Eddie D'Arcy:

In general, we have to accept that the medical profession and the hospitals are under pressure and often see someone's drug issue as being sort of self-inflicted. There is still a bit of a sense of that and they think there is nothing they can do. They do not really want them in the casualty departments. Even when we bring people to hospital for physical ailments, you get the sense that they do not really want this person there. In fact, if we were not there with them, they------

Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party)
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They would be turned away.

Mr. Eddie D'Arcy:

-----might be just turfed out. I can understand why at times. The hospitals are warm, you can sit there all night and obviously people suffering from addiction often see it as a safe place to be. There is still a feeling in middle Ireland that it is self-inflicted and a sense that there are more important people in the country than people with addiction. That is still there.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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We will go into supplementary questions now. Does Deputy Crowe have any additional questions?

Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)
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We were talking about the whole area of youth through the justice system and the lens of it. Again, it seems to be that if you are seen as a potential problem, the supports, the funding or group is there in relation to it, as Mr. Perth mentioned in his opening statement. We seem to pigeonhole young people who are a potential problem. All of a sudden, there is funding there in the justice system but not if they are outside of it. Will Mr. Perth expand on what he is trying to say on that?

On the parks stuff, they are putting in a lot of machinery for calisthenics and so on in parts of Tallaght and elsewhere. Mr. Perth makes the point that it is all right to put the machines in place, but you need supports for young people - and not so young people like me - who do not know how to use them. If there is not someone there to guide them through, if they do not know how to use them or if they are not seen as something they would use, they are not going to see them as an addition to their lives, their community or whatever else. Will he address those two points?

I am not excluding anyone else in relation to some of the things. Mr. McCann referred to the Traveller stuff and the education element of it. I remember when I was the education spokesperson at one time, overnight a Minister did away with all the Traveller supports such as those people who used to call out to the house. It was a call the Minister at the time made. The unions at the time were complaining about class sizes and all of a sudden there were a thousand of these teachers and they were diverted somewhere else. Has that had an impact on Travellers?

Mr. Thomas McCann:

Absolutely. The visiting teachers service was there to try to bridge the gap between families and schools. Unfortunately that was just cut. It was just taken away. Nothing was put in to replace that to bridge that gap between the families and the schools. That has been looked at again and again to put something in there to address the difficulties the families have, including the historical educational difficulties they have in terms of helping people, but also around the evictions and having people move on.

Coming back to the young people, there is a very high percentage of younger Travellers in the Oberstown campus. I agree that in order to avail of the services you need to be identified as a problem, but for Travellers there are no supports in place for that. There are no supports for a lot of younger Travellers. They do not get the opportunity to engage with a lot of supports. Many of them are ending up in Oberstown.

Regarding what Mr. Collins and Mr. McCarthy were saying earlier on about that pilot, there needs to be outreach addiction services that reach out into the community and are culturally appropriate. That is the way to engage and to build that relationship. Otherwise, that gap is not going to be narrowed between the services that are there and many of the Travellers. An individual Traveller may come in and go out. Even within that, a lot of younger Travellers find it hard to be in that environment sometimes because of racism and discrimination within some of the groups. Even though they are disadvantaged groups, they still have that exclusion, and likewise in the LGBT community. We need to look at how we address some of the internal stuff within the services because that is what has come back. There are ways of addressing some of those things. It is not beyond the capacity of the members of the communities who are working on the ground to address some of those issues but they need the collaboration and the resources to do that and the structures to do that in. There is a very high percentage of younger Travellers in Oberstown and we need to look at that.

I mentioned Dóchas earlier in terms of prisoners coming out of prison and the supports they get, for example, Traveller women coming out of Dóchas. We need to put in supports for the women coming out. When moving on to private rented accommodation, they might be excluded from their community. They are left in a position where there is a very high chance, and it has happened many times, that they will end up back in there again. A lot them do not get the support they need. Those issues need to be addressed. I am also talking about younger women.

Mr. John Paul Collins:

A key example of the educational element was in 2006 and 2007. There was 100% transition from primary to post-primary for Travellers. In 2008, with austerity measures and cuts, there was an 87% cut to the overall Traveller budget. It was completely disproportionate compared with any other community. All the hard work put in by Travellers and Traveller organisations to achieve that transition was pulled out from under their feet. The last Traveller education strategy finished in 2006 and the new one will only be launched this year. That is an example of where things are at in Traveller education.

Mr. Paul Perth:

I totally agree about parks and calisthenics and things like that. They are going up all over Tallaght. We believe all our young people should be trained up. A guy we work with has just been trained up in calisthenics. The rationale behind that is we are not going to be on the streets all the time. We will not be in the parks. He trains his peers. It is peer-to-peer education, which is crucial. On language, the Deputy is right. I said in the statement that we use language like "hard to reach young people", "harder to reach young people", "hard to reach workers" and "harder to reach workers". We are going from "at-risk" to "the most at-risk" young people. We have a joke in the team; we work with the most at-risk and somebody will say, "Well, I work the most more at-risk". When do we stop? Young people are young people. We are trying to get away from that language. We are only three years into our project. As we develop, we are trying to get away from "who is the most at risk" and "who are we trying to target."

We brought a middle-class artist out with us and we met two young girls sitting in the park. It was dark. One was reading something on her phone. She got into conversation with the artist. It was about a play. They spoke for ten minutes while I spoke to the other girl. Long story short, when we left the artist said to me, "I cannot believe that she actually knew about that play and was reading it. It is a play that people in Killinarden do not read, usually." That is why I have a problem with "at risk". That girl connected with that artist because she engaged with her in her space. She probably needed that connection. It is probably the only time any adult has ever sat with her in her area and connected with this play. The artist said it does not belong in parks in Killinarden. There is a problem with the language we use. We need to look at it and look at ourselves and how we deliver programmes. Do we need to get people into groups? Can we deliver programmes? We have seen programmes from the Rape Crisis Centre delivered informally, standing at the shops in Killinarden, Jobstown or Fettercairn and different parts of the country. Every approach can be changed and needs to be challenged.

Lynn Ruane (Independent)
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There were some great conversations. Thinking of that informal setting, if you back to Ancient Greece, that is how philosophers developed all their big ideas, standing on the street talking and people gathering around and listening. They are not new ideas but there was a professionalisation and they "middle-class-ified" our communities by seeing it as an opportunity to work or for a career. There was all this local knowledge and working class people who worked hard to find buildings to open services and it was just pushed out. Hard-to-reach people are just the most let down in terms of the workers because we do not evaluate our own skillset with everything having to be in a physical building, as Deputy Crowe said earlier. Years ago, everyone went out onto the streets. When I developed the drug services in Bluebell, I think I was one year on the street before I even opened the door of the centre because there was never a drug service there before. That is what works. For some people, other services or higher levels up in management services want to create the idea that that is unsafe. I do not feel unsafe in my community when I hang around the shops or when chatting to someone in a park - someone else tells me I should feel unsafe. The constraint on the work does not come from the workers or the young people; it comes from somewhere else. We need to resist it massively.

Mr. McCann mentioned cultural appropriateness. There were discussions when we developed the interim report around what that looks like at policy and government levels but also at service provision level. When I worked in drugs services 20 years ago, there were one or two Travellers I had to secretly work with. They would not come into a group. It was the same when I was in the homeless sector. I think there were two homeless women with alcohol addiction. That was 20 years ago. The landscape has changed but the services have not moved adequately.

When looking at cultural appropriateness, what does that mean? Will Mr. McCann and Mr. Collins comment? Does it mean making mainstream services culturally appropriate? Is it making sure what is delivered and offered in the programme is culturally appropriate? Does it mean the staff are diverse enough that the staff is culturally appropriate? At what layers does "culturally appropriate" apply? What does it look like?

Mr. Thomas McCann:

I will comment and then perhaps Mr. Collins can comment. The Senator is dead right about avoiding the structure, which needs to be addressed. Before I discuss cultural appropriateness, Traveller women are 22 times more likely to end up in prison than settled women. That gives an idea of where we are in terms of structural issues that need to be addressed. On cultural appropriateness, that is why I said "the community of stakeholders". It involves looking at how services are organised, developed, delivered and engage with the community at different levels. In 2006, A Vision for Change identified the need for culturally appropriate mental health services. In 2008, there was a HSE intercultural health strategy. Now, in Sharing the Vision and other strategies, there is a call for that again. It is not just for Travellers, by the way, but for other communities as well. We live in a multicultural society.

We need to develop culturally appropriate services. Part of that is making sure the service is anti-racist and there are proper structures and policies in place and oversight. It is the organisation's responsibility to make sure it is there for workers on the ground along with the support to implement it. It is not just the provider of services. I have a difficulty with term "hard to reach communities". It is "hard to reach services". From my perspective, the community is quite easy to reach. I engage with them every day. I am sure other people engage with their own communities every day. It is the services that are hard to reach. I have stopped using the term "hard to reach communities" because it creates a discourse that we are having a difficulty with that community.

The community is a stakeholder in developing the cultural appropriateness. On the law, the question that arises for me is: who does the law protect? Who makes the law? Earlier, there was a discussion about stop and search. I worked with Traveller men who were stopped 12 or 13 times a day because of their name and they were known in an area. If you look at all the laws that have been made, many do not protect the Traveller community. I am sure they do not protect disadvantaged working class people either.

We need to ask who the law is being made to protect.

Mr. John Paul Collins:

I agree with that. It needs to happen at all levels. We need to see cultural competency and anti-racism training. We are involved in this work to make change and to have a positive influence on our clients' futures and lives. Anti-racism and cultural competency needs to happen across the board but particularly among front-line workers within the services themselves. It needs to be mandatory within the services that staff are given cultural competency and anti-racism training because without that, we are on a highway to nowhere in achieving what we want to achieve.

Mr. Eddie D'Arcy:

I wish to respond to some of the things Mr. Collins said regarding the justice and youth work money. We all work for projects that to a large extent get money from the Department of Justice. The Department is very clear that it is its money and it is very clear about the cohorts of people it wants us to work with. Our Rua Youth Justice project, which is part of the Solas Project, is about working with young people who are considered by An Garda Síochána to be unsuited for diversion. They are before the courts facing multiple charges and are not in another project. The criteria are very clear and An Garda Síochána selects the young people we are to target. We have 20 young people from the Drimnagh and Crumlin areas in Dublin 8 and Dublin 20. I have no difficulty with that because they are a group that were not worked with previously. The real difficulty for me is that more money is provided by the Department of Justice to work with young people caught up in possible early offending than there is by the Department of children to work with young people before they get to that stage. There is a tension there and the real difficulty is that the Department of children and the Government more generally do not actually value youth work as a source of support for young people in general. The young girl in the park in Killinarden is not on the target list of a justice project because she is only eight or nine and she probably has not, or could not, have committed offences because she is too young. There is a sense that youth work in working-class and other communities is not valued. The huge support that voluntary youth groups gave in the past has disappeared to a large extent so there is a huge vacuum there. The issue is not that youth justice projects should not be targeting who they are targeting because it is justice money. The real difficulty is that there is no general approach to youth work. I do not know how many young people live in Killinarden but it is a good few thousand. The reality is that the vast majority of those young people may have little or no contact with youth workers.

On the issue of parks, we put hundreds of thousands of euro into providing really good playgrounds for children up to the age of seven. The parks are also really great for older people like me to have a walk and to walk my dog in. However, we do not set aside any space in our parks specifically for teenagers, unlike a lot of other countries do, so obviously, a group of teenagers in certain public parks is a source of annoyance or leads to a sense of danger for some people. They will say, "Oh, there is a gang of young people in the park." So many times we go to policing forum meetings and all that is talked about is gangs of young people hanging around the park or the shops. At the last such meeting in the city centre, I said that the only people committing crime in the whole of the inner city must be young people because that is all the forum ever talks about. All that people want to do is keep moving them on. When we are designing parks, we need to include spaces for young people. In other countries we see facilities such as table tennis tables, basketball courts, little football areas and other facilities that young people can use free of charge. We do not really provide for teenagers at all. All we want to do is drive them out because other people do not feel safe around them. That sends a really bad message to young people and results in some of the stuff that Mr. Collins talked about, with young people destroying resources in their own communities because they feel there is no space provided for them.

Mr. Thomas McCarthy:

I will make two brief points. When we are talking about young people and youth justice, young Travellers are not even in the conversation generally. I was a youth worker for 15 years and worked in the drugs and alcohol area for the last few years of that. Nobody ever came and asked us if we were working with young Travellers or whether we had done cultural competency or anti-racism training. Nobody ever asked that - neither the funder or those working in the policy area. That is a gap, for sure.

Tallaght is great. It has lots of lovely green spaces, parks and so on but in places like Inchicore or Fatima Mansions, where I live, there is no space for young people. It has been urbanised and is getting even more urbanised all of the time. The playing pitches and Astro turf pitches are all in bits. They are full of glass, the Astroturf is rotten and they are not repaired. The kids are in these urban areas on the corners but where else are they going to go? They do not have anywhere else to go. In my area of Fatima Mansions street dealing is just part of life; it is just the way it is and it is all young men who are involved in it. All of them are criminally groomed into gangs. I know some of the dealers they are dealing for. All of this is going on but we do not want to think about it or talk about it.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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The committee produced a very comprehensive report based on hearings with witnesses who came before us. It was an interim report, although it may end up being the final report of the committee because there will be a general election in a number of weeks. The report is very progressive. One of the main areas it touches on is repealing the Misuse of Drugs Act. We cannot really discuss decriminalisation without talking about legislation and the law that has been criminalising people for nearly 50 years. I would like the views of the witnesses on the interim report that we produced, which stemmed from the citizens' assembly. Hopefully that report, in some guise, can be implemented by the next Government. If it is not implemented it will just gather dust. How confident are they that this will progress into something that we all want to see?

Mr. John Paul Collins:

There is no question but that it is an excellent report. It is very proactive and visionary but the key is the implementation. In terms of the actions recommended in the report, if they were implemented, we would not be here in a few year having the same discussion.

Mr. Eddie D'Arcy:

I am delighted by the fact that this committee exists. I was also absolutely delighted that a citizens' assembly was held on drugs and I am delighted with the report. My only concern is that we do not end up tinkering around the edges and making minor changes. We need a completely different approach if we are going to see anything different happen. From my perspective, I see regulation or legalisation as the only real way we are going to see a radical change. I do not want to hear anybody in this House saying that no other country has tried it. Why can we not be the first? That is how I feel about it. Why do we have to wait until somebody else decides to do it? I congratulate the Chairman on the process of this committee and on getting that report out so quickly. I hope there will be time for a final edition as well.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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Thanks for that. The staff here have been fantastic and all the members have been really good about getting that report out.

Mr. Karl Ducque:

I thank everyone for their work and input but it is all about the implementation. I was involved as an expert in the citizens' assembly. I got to meet the assembly members and got to see the process first-hand. We opened their eyes up to the trauma-informed approach, the importance of separating the person from the addiction, looking at why a person took drugs and seeing that it is all based on trauma. I have been involved with task forces and national drugs strategies over the years and have seen them not being implemented. I have seen the number of recommendations that have come from them but years down the line, they still have not been implemented. I would really love to see this being implemented, a health-led approach to treating people in addiction with compassion and care. Section 3, for me, has to go. I know from working with young people that it effects them so much. It is crazy. I was talking to a probation officer last night about a young person who had come in, at 20 years of age, on a first charge under section 3. What effect will that have? If he applies for a job now, that section 3 offence is not going to come off his record. If he is Garda vetted, it will be there. The suspended sentence does not change that.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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That person will have a criminal record for the rest of his life. It is unbelievable really.

Mr. Robert Whiteley:

I want to come in on the point Mr. Ducque made about a criminal record, especially for young people. For a lot of the young people we work with, whether they are from the Traveller or settled community, when trauma is in the mix, it leads to drug use and criminality.

My view on the Criminal Justice (Spent Convictions and Certain Disclosures) Act 2016 would be that it only allows for your convictions to be spent after a seven-year period but if you have a conviction for more than one of dangerous driving, theft or possession of drugs, your convictions can never be spent. Those sorts of crimes are inevitable when people are caught up in addiction; they come hand-in-hand.

The reason people get addicted to drugs goes back to trauma related to stuff that happened early on in their lives that is no fault of their own. They have been let down for years. They fall into this circle. When they pick up these charges later on in life, these convictions will be with them for the rest of their life. It damages their future life opportunities and they are caught in that trap.

We engage with them as youth workers and community workers. We try to help people progress but they are caught; they have an anchor on them because of something they did years previously.

People do recover and change. I come across many people who come from that background. They would have been in St. Patrick's Institution because of drug addiction and stuff but now have degrees and are involved in youth or community work in the caring professions trying to help these other people, but their life opportunities are diminished as well. They cannot travel to America, Australia or Canada because of stuff that happened years ago.

I really believe that people deserve a second chance. If you can prove to society that you have changed and you can do this through, for example, achieving a degree and stuff, and you are working and contributing to society, you should be granted a second chance. You should have your previous convictions expunged. We really need to look at an expunging process here in Ireland and move away from the punitive sort of approach that it will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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Very good. Did Mr. Perth want to come in?

Mr. Paul Perth:

I just want to say thanks for the invitation to be part of this process. This is my second time here. It is great to have a voice and to be heard, which does not usually happen to those coming from working-class communities.

I welcome the report. I am wary of the word "decriminalisation" although not on a personal level. Out there, there is a fear of it. We have to be careful and we have to explain what it means. Like everything right-wing, people can take things and turn them into something else so we must have a definition. From many different conversations, I have heard people explain what decriminalisation is. If it is defined and it is clear, there is no arguing with it. It is black or white.

We also must have a holistic approach because there is trauma. There are reasons people take drugs. It is not always just for the craic - to go out, have a joint and go to work tomorrow. Some people cannot put it, and drugs in general, down. There have to be backup services in the holistic approach.

There is stuff we talked about earlier on. People are waiting six years for assessments, including neurodiversity assessments. Proper services must be provided so that for anybody using drugs, it becomes a choice rather a need.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I will call Ms Kelly. I will go around to everybody.

Ms Brenda Kelly:

The report is very progressive. As Mr. Ducque said, I would be interested to see how it is implemented. I hope it is.

The previous meetings the committee had were very realistic to the on-the-ground and front-line experience. Thanks a million for having us all here today.

I would like to touch on something that is coming up because it is a recurring theme around class and marginalised communities. These are the people who are being affected by criminalisation. As I said in my opening statement, our stance on decriminalisation came from the direct experience of young people but was the direct experience of working-class LGBTQ+ people. BeLonG To is not geographically based and we would have young people coming from all areas of Dublin, Kildare and Wicklow. They are coming from all different backgrounds, classes and areas. The reason we took that decriminalisation stance was because we were hearing in the groups of young people engaging in identical behaviours, but the young people in working-class areas were picking up charges because of possession of drugs. Middle-class young people were doing the exact same things and not picking up charges. The working-class young people then are struggling to get employment and go into education because of these charges. As Mr. Perth said, that is making it harder to reach young people.

I thank the committee for its important work and for having us here today.

Mr. Thomas McCarthy:

I got the report yesterday.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I did not expect Mr. McCarthy to read the whole thing, just the main points.

Mr. Thomas McCarthy:

I had a good go at it. I did not go into all the follow-up quotes, etc., but I looked at the recommendations.

When I saw it, I was warmed. I was happy to see it. We had been involved in the citizens' assembly, made submissions to it, etc. When I read it, I thought that is backing up everything that the citizens' assembly was saying. My next thought was "they have to go with this now, they will have to take on all those recommendations". The citizens' assembly is after hearing from every expert they could find and every community member and person affected by addiction. All these voices and all of these experts fed submissions into it. We have these two documents and you cannot argue with them. Even though I felt they had to go with it, inside me was the sceptic and the cynic thinking that they are not going to do it and it is not going to happen.

What I would say is, I am hopeful. This is progressive and informative. It is something that we should do. It is community based and is fed into by the people. This is the people's Parliament. The people have spoken. They have said we must implement these actions. So let us get them across the line. That is my hope.

As someone who works in the Traveller community, I would say there are lots of policies and strategies but they are rarely given enough money. All of the money that these services need should be given to them - end of story - and no questions asked.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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Does Mr. McCann want to come in?

Mr. Thomas McCann:

Yes, thanks. The work of this committee and the citizens' assembly is really important, as are their reports on decriminalisation. As I said, there is a need for culturally appropriate interventions as one size does not fit all communities.

From within the Traveller community and in my own right, from the early 1980s I have been involved in Traveller rights. A number of reports have issued and recommendations have been made. As has been said, the community is losing hope that this system cares about them at all or is really going to implement the changes that are needed. That has come up repeatedly about implementation. If we took all the recommendations that have been made in the past 40 years, we would have substantial change. What the community and the services want is to see some of the recommendations implemented. They want to see follow through. Earlier on, I mentioned A Vision for Change in 2006. In 2012, there was the HSE's intercultural strategy. There is a rake of recommendations there but they have not been followed through. The community does not want another report, people want to know if these recommendations are really going to be implemented. It is the same with other committees. This comes up repeatedly.

I thank the committee. I really value the work that this committee is doing and that the citizens' assembly has done.

Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I thank Mr. McCann. We will probably end on that positive note.

I thank everybody for coming in today and engaging with the committee, Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Collins, Ms Kelly, Mr. Ducque, Mr. Perth, Mr. Whiteley, Mr. D'Arcy and Mr. McCann. Their contributions have been very valuable.

I also thank Senator Lynn Ruane. Senator Ruane's contribution over the lifetime of this committee has been amazing. I thank the staff as well. The staff are fantastic. Without the staff, these committees would not function as well as they do.