A group of Dublin City councillors have opposed any legislation to decriminalise currently illegal drugs and rejected the findings of the Oireachtas Committee on Drug Use.
A motion tabled by Independent Councillor Malachy Steenson at the Central Area Committee yesterday sparked a heated debate on Dublin’s addiction crisis. With a tally of eight in favour and four against, Cllr Steenson’s motion was passed and demanded a “shift away from policy debates toward immediate action on detox beds and drug gang enforcement”.
Responding the Oireachtas’s final report published in June, which recommended a comprehensive health-led response to possession of drugs for personal use and decriminalisation, Cllr Steenson accused its findings of catering to the “ruling class” who are “banging coke up their nose at the weekend and don’t want to get done for it”.
Arguing that North Inner City communities have already “paid the price” with decades of drug abuse since the heroin epidemic began in the 1980s, Cllr Steenson called for the strict prosecution of all illegal drug users. “Whether it’s Johnny from Clontarf or Ballsbridge, if caught with a bag of coke they should be brought before the courts and they should be prosecuted,” he said.
Malachy Steenson
“If their lives are destroyed because of that, so be it. If it’s good enough to destroy the lives of inner city people, I’m not going to sit back and allow woke liberals to destroy my constituency.
“I have carried many, many coffins, including four of my wife’s siblings who died because of drug addiction. I’ve a son in recovery, I’ve a daughter who is still in addiction, and I’m rearing a 16-year-old girl – a grandchild of mine who we took in when she was three months old because her parents were strung out. That is the reality.
“We have moved on from heroin to crack to cocaine to fentanyl to more tablets being sold on Talbot Street than are sold in all the pharmacies in the inner city.”
Warning against the Oireachtas advice for a health-based approach to drugs, Cllr Steenson spoke of previous attempts to tackle the heroin crisis through methadone only for users to fall further into addiction. “I don’t know anybody since that time who went on methadone who has ever come off it,” he said.
Vehemently criticising the government, Cllr Steenson said promises of more detox beds never materialised and that to decriminalise substances will only worsen the drugs trade. “I’m not going to sit back and allow woke liberals to pursue their own agenda just so they can get high at the weekends,” he said.
Citing recent proposals to ban scramblers and e-scooters, he said the biggest problem related to those vehicles is “the supply and delivery of drugs by working class young fellas to addicts in the inner city”. “We need to stop the drug trade, we need to implement the law as it is,” he said, stating legislation already prohibits young people riding scramblers and those laws, along with drug enforcement, should be implemented.
The motion divided councillors, although all agreed that drug addiction in the city was a problem that needed to be seriously addressed. Social Democrats Cllr Cat O’Driscoll said she did not believe it was appropriate for their area committee to oppose the work of experts.
“I think as a global society we have failed in tackling the impact of drugs,” she said, while highlighting the need to look out for the “most vulnerable” in society. “Our prisons are full of people that are not getting what they need to escape the many traps a lot of them fall into, not just addiction, there is the impact of poverty and the great inequality that exists.”
Cllr O’Driscoll stressed that “decades of poor policy” has failed citizens and supported government investment in a “genuine health-based approach”. She agreed that policing should still have a role in addressing the drug crisis and said “I don’t think it’s up to us to take a decision” on this issue before listening to experts and testimonies from users.
Social Democrats Cllr Ellen O’Doherty opposed the motion and said they should request a session with the Oireachtas Committee to outline their findings. She criticised the lack of detox beds and also called for dual diagnosis beds for drug users with mental health issues, stating there are “none in this state” which she believes is “a shame and criminal”.
Seconding the motion was Independent Cllr Christy Burke who spoke about being a founding member of the Concerned Parents Against Drugs in 1982, a group that included mothers in Hardwicke Street who witnessed their children fall prey to drug addiction and in some cases die as a result.”I carried nearly 300 coffins in the North Inner City in the 1980s and 1990s, none of those mothers were consulted with I can assure you that,” he said.
“Go before every one of those mothers and see the misery. See how they didn’t have the money to bury their children. How they had to go to moneylenders to get it.”
While he believes those on the Oireachtas Committee have good intentions in their findings, Cllr Burke said he’s seen first-hand the destructive effect of drugs on communities. “Over my dead body would I agree to legalise anything that creates misery in this city,” he said.
The links between minors taking drugs at a young age and health problems like psychosis and schizophrenia should also be considered, according to Independent Cllr Nial Ring. Citing research published in The Lancet medical journal, he highlighted the link between adolescent substance misuse and brain development disruptions.
He stressed that inner city children are often the main victims of drug addiction and said it’s “unbelievable” that people can sit “on their high moral ground” while they “stuff cocaine up their noses on the weekend”. “How the Citizen’s Assembly came up with this is beyond me,” he said.
From the Green Party, Cllr Janet Horner opposed the motion and said that she genuinely believes decriminalisation is about “harm reduction” and “protecting people in the community”. She called on councillors to work together on a shared agenda that protects the health of people “in very vulnerable situations”.
“Our shared agenda is about cracking down on networks of drug dealing and distribution destroying lives of those in the area and supporting those who are trying to put in place the resources and the networks that will actually drive forward change and support people’s lives,” she said.
She said addiction is a “huge crisis” and that focusing on “red herring debates” is not helping the community. “We need to do more to resource organisations that are driving forward change,” she said.
Sinn Féin Cllr Janice Boylan spoke about her personal connection to the topic and said it’s impossible for people who have not experienced the effects of drug addiction on families to truly understand the issue. “My father had 15 brothers and sisters – seven of them ended up on heroin in the 1980s and we buried them after drug overdoses or sickness from using for so long,” she said.
She described the drug crisis in the North Inner City as a “travesty” and said people outside of it don’t see the “poverty, stress, and intimation” of drug barons knocking on doors and demanding money or people falling ever further into their addictions.
Cllr Boylan said there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the crisis and that some people benefit from a health-based approach while others continually relapse. She said the important thing is to resource communities and ensure the voices of those actually affected are listened to.
Fellow Sinn Féin Cllr Séamas McGrattan said “it’s not for the area committee to reject findings” but that he believes communities most affected by drug addiction should have been consulted more. “I sat on the Supply Reduction Committee for 15 years and stood in houses of family members when drug dealers have come in call in debts. I’ve seen how this affects our communities,” he said.
Cllr McGrattan said he was “genuinely shocked” to see the Oireachtas support decriminalisation as he thought it was “premature”. “Until we tackle the scourge of drug barons we are nowhere near decriminalisation. Nobody was talking about decriminalisation in the ‘80s or ‘90s, but now it has moved from working class areas to others it has become a different talk and there are different views,” he said.
The Oireachtas Committee on Drugs final report calls for the law to be updated to provide “mobile consumption facilities and consumption sites” for drug use. They state this will serve as a “harm-reduction measure for people who use drugs, but also to reduce the prevalence of street use”.
The findings called on the government to end short prison sentences for non violent drug-related offences and instead take a “health-led approach to helping drug users, particularly primary caregivers, to allow them to recover and provide adequate care for their dependent children”.
The Oireachtas Committee recommended significantly improving funding for community-based services and to divert those found in possession of drugs for personal use to health services. They also call for nationally run prevention campaigns to promote “sensible drug use that reduces harm and saves lives”.
With a tally of eight in favour and four against, Cllr Steenson’s motion was passed and will be referred to the full Dublin City Council meeting in September. The full motion was as follows:
“This Area Committee rejects the findings of the Oireachtas Committee on Drug Use and confirms its commitment to oppose any legalisation or decriminalisation of currently illegal drugs and seeks a real commitment from the State agencies to finally bring an end to the cancer that has destroyed and continues to destroy parts of our area. A cancer that has got worse year by year and decade by decade where we now see children as young as ten involved in dealing and parents being violently pursued with immunity by drug gangs for the drug debts of their children.”
In favour:Cllr Janice Boylan (Sinn Féin)Cllr Christy Burke (Independent)Cllr Séamas McGrattan (Sinn Féin)Cllr Cieren Perry (Independent)Cllr Gayle Ralph (Fine Gael)Cllr Nial Ring (Independent)Cllr John Stephens (Fianna Fáil)Against:Cllr Janet Horner (Green Party)Cllr Feljin Jose (Green Party)Cllr Ellen O’Doherty (Social Democrats)Cllr Cat O’Driscoll (Social Democrats)Absent:Cllr Ray McAdam (Fine Gael)Cllr Colm O’Rourke (Fine Gael)
This content is funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme
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