Joint Committee on Drugs Use debate -
Thursday, 26 Sep 2024

No apologies have been received. Deputy Ó Murchú is substituting for Deputy Mark Ward.

Parliamentary privilege is considered to apply to the utterances of members participating online in the committee meeting when 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 today.

This is our first meeting of this very important committee on the subject of a health-led approach. The committee's members welcome the witnesses and thank them for coming here today. We would like to hear from them over the next couple of hours. I will introduce our guests. Ms Anna Quigley is the project lead of the Citywide Drugs Crisis Campaign.

We also have members from the Irish Prison Service: Ms Caron McCaffrey, Mr. David Joyce, Ms Sarah Hume, Ms Anne Collins, the national clinical lead for mental health and addiction, and Mr. David Treacy. They are all very welcome. I invite Ms Quigley to make her opening statement.

I thank the committee for the opportunity to be here today. CityWide is a network of community organisations and activists set up in 1995 to campaign for a community development response to drugs. That is about involving the communities most affected by the drugs issue in developing and delivering the services and responses we need. CityWide has been at the heart of the State’s response to drugs since first being invited in by Government in 1996. For more than a decade from 1996 to 2009, we experienced a genuine State commitment to community-led inter-agency partnership, but our experience in more recent years has been of a gradual and continuing decline of this commitment to a point where it is no longer implemented in practice, in our experience. We strongly agree with the statements by Paul Reid, chair of the citizens’ assembly, about the absolute urgency of the current situation and with what we have heard from committee members about how the drug and alcohol task forces have been sidelined, structures for inter-agency accountability are not working and investment across services is inadequate. It is important to state clearly and acknowledge that there are great people involved across all agencies and sectors but everyone is being failed by what is basically systemic dysfunction.

I will highlight five key points as to how we can address this. The first is a social analysis. In our view, a starting point needs to be a social analysis that looks at both the context and causes of drug-related harms. We know that drugs have an impact across all levels of society, that a significant majority of people who use drugs do not develop an addiction and that the worst harms continue to affect communities most affected by poverty and inequality. This is key because how we respond needs to be informed and shaped by these realities and not by moral judgement and stigmatisation. One of the very clear messages from our social analysis is that there is no basis for maintaining a policy of criminalising people who use drugs. This has been supported by evidence the committee has heard from a range of international speakers. It is also our experience in the community that a policy of criminalisation has the effect of undermining every other positive action we might take. It needs to end now. The worst harms relating to the drug trade also impact the communities most affected by poverty and inequality. The levels of fear generated as a result of intimidation and violence in our communities prevent the normal social justice process from working. We need to start an honest discussion about how we can address this reality.

The second point is about community development. In previous years, the role of the community representative on the drug and alcohol task forces reflected community development in action. In other words, the people most affected were involved in the responses. As the role of the task forces has been sidelined, so has the role of community representatives. It is crucial that we have a conversation now about how this role can be restored and revitalised. This will require resources to be allocated for community development supports and networking at local, regional and national levels. There also needs to be support and resources for the representatives of people who use drugs, UISCE, families, the national family support steering group and very much the representatives of the Traveller community, Pavee Point. A new challenge for us is to develop the involvement of migrant and ethnic minority communities and the LGBTI+ community.

The third key point is the need for interagency partnership. It is not just about committees; it is about what interagency means in day-to-day working. The drug and alcohol task forces were set up as a structure to support and facilitate that day-to-day working at a local and regional level. They worked as an effective model for many years in our experience but a number of key operational changes to the task forces in recent years have not been positive in their impact. We need to look at this and what we can do now to address the negative impacts.

The fourth point is investment in services. Our experience over 30 years and the experience in Portugal in the 20-plus years since it decriminalised show how essential it is as we move towards ending the criminalisation of people who use drugs that we invest in a range of addiction services appropriate to people’s needs and in the related social services, in particular housing and employment supports, mental health services, childcare and psychology services. It is a positive for us in Ireland that we have in our community drug projects and community youth projects. They are an ideal model for delivering this integrated approach to meeting people’s needs but there has been a failure to invest in and build on the projects’ potential. This is an extraordinary and unacceptable waste of opportunity that needs to be immediately addressed.

The fifth point relates to structures for accountability. This came up in the committee's discussions today. We strongly support the citizens' assembly's recommendation that implementation of the drugs strategy needs to be led by the Department of the Taoiseach working to a Cabinet subcommittee chaired by the Taoiseach. Experience tells us that the process of having a high-level committee involved needs to be supported and facilitated on a day-to-day basis by a full-time working structure similar to the national drug strategy team, which was in place for more than ten years, because it provides a crucial link between communities, the work of task forces on the ground and the Cabinet subcommittee. It is also crucial to the implementation of our drugs strategy that there is accountability for how effectively we tackle the underlying causes of poverty and inequality. To do this, we need to re-establish an independent and well-resourced Combat Poverty Agency which should also be located within the Department of the Taoiseach.

As we look to move away from policies based on moral judgement, stigma and shame, we need to engage in a conversation with wider society through the roll-out of a national anti-stigma campaign that builds on the key principles of the initial campaign carried out through CityWide and the SAOL Project, co-designed and delivered by people with lived experience of using drugs and experiencing drug-related stigma. I am happy to take questions from members on any of that.

I am pleased to have the opportunity to address the committee today as it considers the topic of a health-led approach. It is a privilege to speak to the committee about the important work of the Irish Prison Service, a key component of our criminal justice system. At our core, the mission of the Irish Prison Service is to help to build a safer and fairer Ireland by providing safe and secure custody with dignity of care for those committed to us. We strive to reduce the risk of harm to the public and the likelihood of reoffending by facilitating rehabilitation and reintegration into the community. Our responsibility is not only to ensure that people serve their sentences but also to engage them meaningfully, offering rehabilitative opportunities for prisoners to effect lasting beneficial changes in their lives.

The challenges we face in the prison system are considerable but our vision is clear: prisons should not be seen solely as places of punishment, but also as institutions of opportunity. Our goal is to change lives, not merely to detain them. By doing this we can reduce future potential harm and reduce the number of victims of crime. One needs only to call to mind the recent incident of mass overdose in Portlaoise Prison to understand the significant challenges we face in addiction and drug use in our prisons. Broadly speaking, we know that more than 70% of those in custody are struggling with addiction and we understand that addiction is intrinsically linked to mental health. When we assess someone in prison, we look at the whole person, recognising that their addiction has often been a survival mechanism, a coping strategy for the challenges they have faced in their lives.

Addiction is often discussed in two contexts - as a medical problem or as a legal issue - but these discussions frequently fail to ask the most important question, that is, why addiction become a part of this person’s life. It is rare to find someone in our custody suffering from addiction who has not experienced trauma or unmet needs in their life. Each person’s journey is unique and we must approach their care with that understanding. We have a responsibility to provide services that meet each individual where they are, addressing their psychological, emotional and social needs. When it comes to caring for a person in addiction, one size does not fit all.

It is worth noting that the average school-leaving age for those committed to custody today is 14. This figure is particularly sobering and highlights the need for early intervention. Many of these individuals have faced significant childhood adversity, including trauma, exposure to illicit drug use or mental health issues in their families. In many cases where children have suffered significant adverse childhood incidences or where their parents have addiction or mental health issues, their ability to engage with formal education is often impaired. Where a child falls out of the education system, they are much more vulnerable to offending behaviour. The research and lived experiences of those who have gone through the criminal justice system indicate that without a formal education, a person is significantly more likely to engage in criminal activity than someone who completes their education and secures employment.

The publication of the Irish Prison Service Strategy 2023-2027 and our drugs strategy 2023-2026 mark a milestone in our continued journey to transform the prison system. These documents represent a collective commitment to the well-being and safety of all who work and live in our prisons and the rehabilitation of people in our care.

Our drugs strategy reaffirms our commitment to reducing the harm of drug use within the prison population. The strategy is built upon three pillars. The first is reduction in the amount of contraband entering prisons by further developing security measures that will enhance the detection and prevention of smuggling of drugs into prisons. The second is providing evidence-based information and education to all people living and working within our prisons to increase awareness of the devastating effects of illicit drug use. The third is growing and improving medical and therapeutic interventions and services for prisoners living with addiction. In doing so, the Irish Prison Service will recognise the overlapping presentations of addiction and mental health conditions. This pillar will also pursue an integrated approach to promote and maintain optimum physical and psychological health for prisoners. Addiction is not a problem that can be solved overnight, but with targeted resources and collaboration, we in the Prison Service can make a real difference.

As of the end of July, over 600 prisoners across our estate are engaged in addiction counselling, with more than 800 awaiting access to these services. This shows the scale of the problem, which has been exacerbated by the ever-increasing prisoner population. Our partnership with Merchants Quay Ireland and other organizations such as AA and NA provides critical support to those in our care. Another vital source of support and health promotion for prisoners comes in the form of the peer-led Irish Red Cross programme. There are Red Cross prisoner volunteers across the prison estate who are trained by healthcare and educational staff to disseminate information to prisoners regarding illicit drug use and overdose awareness and prevention. We are also developing a peer-led recovery model, which will address both addiction and mental health challenges. In this regard we are currently working with DCU to develop, deliver and promote a pilot mental health and substance use recovery initiative across four prisons over a three-year period. The recovery college approach was pioneered to support people to develop their own skills and confidence in order to maximise their potential. An important element of this approach will be the principle of co-production, meaning people with personal experience will work in respectful partnerships with professionals to design, deliver and evaluate all aspects of the programme together. Peer support is about mutual support including the sharing of experiential knowledge and skills and social learning and plays an invaluable role in recovery. Peer support workers will use their own lived experience of psychological distress and recovery to offer advice, empathy, and validation.

This approach, which combines innovative programmes like the recovery college model and the introduction of an addiction studies course, will ensure we are providing a comprehensive and person-centred approach to rehabilitation. Plans are also being drawn up to establish a HSE-led dual diagnosis pilot service within Cork Prison. This will again improve our capability to provide a holistic therapeutic approach to prisoners living with addiction and mental health issues. This service will also aim to improve the linkage of prisoners to equivalent community services to ensure people do not fall between the cracks upon committal or release.

Preventing the trafficking of drugs into prisons remains a top priority. We continue to invest in new technologies and security measures to combat the smuggling of contraband. Alongside this, our information campaigns aim to educate prisoners about the dangers of illegal substances to help them make healthier choices. The increasing availability of novel psychoactive substances has changed the landscape of illicit drug use in prisons. These substances are extremely potent and have a very high risk of overdose associated with them. We are actively responding to this dynamic threat by fostering close relationships with colleagues in the National Drug Treatment Centre and the wider HSE. A key component of managing this risk is early identification of substances that have been identified in circulation within prisons and then the very quick provision of up-to-date education for healthcare providers and prisoners.

Mental health care is another critical area of focus. Our psychology service operates through a layered care model by offering primary, secondary, and tertiary mental health supports. This approach ensures people in custody have access to the right level of care for their specific needs, whether it be for mood disorders, PTSD or other complex psychological conditions. As of July, 609 people are receiving care from our psychology service. However, we have almost 2,000 people on a waiting list to see a prison psychologist. We are doing everything we can to reduce waiting times as much as we can and to increase the availability of mental health interventions. This includes streamlining assessments and introducing rolling group therapy sessions, which allow us to reach more individuals more quickly. In budget 2023 we secured an extra €1 million in additional funding to increase our team of psychologists and work is ongoing to employ further psychologists across the Prison Service.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the harm caused to victims of crime. Our work with offenders is not just about reducing reoffending rates. It is about creating fewer victims of crime in future. By helping those in our custody address the root causes of their behaviour and offending we aim to make our communities safer for everyone.

In closing, I reiterate that the Irish Prison Service is deeply committed to the safety, rehabilitation, and reintegration of those in our care. We believe in second chances and in providing the tools people need to build better futures. I again thank the Chairman for the opportunity. We look forward to taking questions he or members may have.

I thank Ms McCaffrey. There are members in the room and online. Each has seven minutes for back-and-forth questions and answers and then there may be a second round.

Our first contributor will be Senator Ruane.

I like to listen to the room before I contribute. I thank the witnesses for the presentations. I think most people are on the same page when it comes to where we want things to go or where we think things should be. Logistically, realising that is a bit more difficult. Ms Collins mentioned intimidation and the need for us to have an honest conversation about that or about drug-related violence. The witnesses have long known my thoughts on that, which are that drug dealing stems from the very same social conditions drug using does, meaning it is about unconditional support regardless of what type of activity a person is engaged in. That is a conversation we have been having at a community level for many years. It also translates into the prison system as well, given what Ms Collins said, in terms of the structures needed in the community. The exact same structures are needed in the prison system, but that system also has obviously got the extra layer of what it is required to do in the sense of people's liberty being taken away and their not being there by consent. Introducing any sort of recovery models or access to things is looking for the same outcome in very different ways, but still both looking for a place where increased safety exists in communities and in prisons with the reduction of violence in both spaces.

That has me thinking about what a health-led model would look like. I visualise it much more clearly in the community because that is where I am used to working, but the witnesses have a different experience given they are used to working in a place where security is also paramount and how those things are in tension somewhat with each other. In a health-led approach or one where we have decriminalisation, the prison would still have to be managed in a way that meant there were was not substance use as such. The substance would still be illegal. Alongside the recovery model, which is great, and the DCU link and the relationship with Merchants Quay Ireland, I am wondering how the balance can be struck between security and rehabilitation. I mean rehabilitation not only with respect to behavioural matters, but also the substance use itself. Have the witnesses had an opportunity to look forward to the next five years were possession to not be illegal? Do we remove a punishment model when somebody is caught in possession where we remove the substance, but there are no repercussions for the possession itself if that is in line with policy on the outside? With alcohol, is someone punished if they are found making alcohol in cells or is it just taken off them?

It is a complex area and I appreciate that. We have a two-pronged approach of reducing supply and reducing demand. Reducing supply is a really important component of what we do. There is a very small number of people who are controlling the trafficking of drugs into our prisons and they devastate people's lives.

To me, a person has a great opportunity in a custodial setting to address his or her addiction, and if we can keep drugs out of the prison, we can create recovery communities, peer-led approaches and places where people can live where there are not drugs within the community. For me, that is the aim, but it has to be a two-pronged approach. As long as drugs are being trafficked into our prisons, it has an absolutely destabilising effect on every aspect of our custodial settings.

To go back to the idea of understanding the why, when we say we need to figure out how to restrict supply, societies have been trying to do that for a long time and it is the essence of the war on drugs, which we are trying to move away from. Obviously, within an institutional setting, I understand there is an extra layer whereby we cannot ignore contraband coming in, but if we are looking at true rehabilitation and at understanding trauma and so on, contraband coming in is probably irrelevant. If we provide the appropriate supports at a society level in every realm of people’s lives, it will be less about focusing on the supply, which has failed as a good use of resources, people's time, the State's money, legal aid and everything else. It is about how we can create a community model within a prison.

My dream is that there would be no prisons, but I will accept that there are. Even the model of addiction counsellors feels outdated to me, although I know that a review has gone out to tender recently. There should be a community development drugs workers, relapse intervention and a hive of community workers, not necessarily just addiction counsellors. If someone comes out of the treatment and rehabilitation programme, TARP, for which Mr. Treacy is responsible, relapses and is found to have a dirty urine sample or be in possession of drugs, he or she might lose some enhanced privileges. If the person is on a progression unit, for example, he or she may be moved back to the main prison, but that is not good relapse intervention. It is punishing someone for a relapse after he or she has gone through a specific programme.

If the structure in the prison was such that the person would be isolated with a view to identifying whether it was a slip or a relapse, perhaps he or she could be offered something to avoid being sent back to square one straight away. Is there any room in the prison system to integrate better community-style structures with the different types of workers who work in communities, such as family support workers and so on, in a much larger way?

Absolutely. The Senator's vision of a multiplicity of services straddling both the prison and community is where we would like to get to. Currently, we have 19 Merchants Quay addiction counsellors, which is clearly insufficient for the needs of the people we have, but that through-care aspect is not there. If someone is engaging with Merchants Quay in prison, it does not follow that he or she will go on to receive the same treatment or programme in the community. We are reviewing our Merchants Quay contract and engaging with the organisation on a service level agreement, SLA. We are also reviewing TARP, our detoxification programme in Mountjoy, to see how it can much more expansive it can become.

Nevertheless, I need to reinforce the point about contraband within prisons. It is not just about a person taking a drug; it is the behaviours that it fuels. If there are drugs within a prison setting, the value will be far in excess of the street value. The user may then become in debt to somebody and be put under pressure to engage in other behaviours in the prison to repay that debt, or the family on the outside may come under pressure to repay it. Drugs do not have an impact just on somebody being able to continue their addiction. They drive so many security-related offences. We have a lot of people in prison on protection and the majority of them seek protection when they come in, which means they cannot engage with all the services that are available to them, because they have a drug debt. The person who is owed may also be in the prison or may have people aligned to him or her in the prison. Drugs within our prisons drive so many issues, difficulties and discord. It is not just about somebody having access to a substance that can allow them to continue their addiction.

We are on a learning journey, and we are certainly changing our mindset in regard to the recovery model approach. We know that the peer-led approach works and we have pioneered some exciting peer-led programmes within the Prison Service. A lot of people with a lived experience who are currently in custody have dealt with their addiction and can provide that service on the landing when people need it, and we can create those recovery communities within our custodial settings, which would look very different from how we work at the moment. It is in its infancy.

Yes, absolutely, and it is a supportive community. Of course people will relapse and we need to look at how we deal with that in a supportive way, but access to drugs in a prison setting is not just about continuing an addiction. It is a multiplicity of impacts. Governor Treacy might wish to talk about what is driven by drug availability in Mountjoy, in particular.

Drugs and contraband coming into prison is not unique to Mountjoy. It is extremely challenging in a prison environment. As the director general said, it is not about what is coming in but the value of what is coming in. In Mountjoy this morning, we have more than 300 prisoners on protection, which is down to issues that are happening in the community, such as drug debts, violence, association with gangs and so on. We are very conscious of what comes in and how we address it. We have a lot of mechanisms in place and we work with our prison community as well. We are well aware a lot of prisoners do not take drugs and do not want to be involved in drug use but may slip into it because of their association with a certain area or gang. We work hard to eradicate it from our prison and have implemented new technologies to keep drugs out of it.

I have had conversations over the years with families who have had people knocking on their door looking for money and been subject to other types of harassment and or attacks on their homes. It is a larger pond than just a person in prison getting drugs. Families are being intimidated and attacked on the outside because of drugs coming into our prison. We work closely with An Garda Síochána and share intelligence to try to combat it. When people seek drugs, they find new ways of getting contraband into our prison, but we constantly try to find ways to cut out these avenues.

If I could come in there, I think this is linked to the issue of structures and the fact the current structures under the drugs strategy are so ineffective. It again highlights the reason we need those structures, as Ms McCaffrey said. The Department of Justice, for example, says we cannot remove section 3 of the Criminal Justice Act because that would lead to unintended consequences whereby it could not follow up people for possession, but these issues the Senator was talking about are difficult and challenging because there is a range of needs to balance. The whole purpose, however, of a high-level, interagency structure is that people would have these conversations, with everyone getting an opportunity to speak from their perspective and other people listening. We would work it out. As a modern democracy, we cannot say that, unfortunately, we cannot do something because it might have an unintended consequence. We should look at the possible consequences and allow for them.

Moreover, while we are critical of the current structures, we also have a sense that it is possible to make them work because of our experience for the first ten years, from 1995 onwards, when the national drugs strategy team and those oversight structures were in place. They worked. They were not perfect and not everything worked, but they amounted to a genuine interagency partnership where these kinds of conversations could happen. It is crucial that we look at that and at how we can put effective structures in place. It is worse to seem to have structures doing that job if they are not doing it. We need effective structures. Conversation is what this is all about. We have to have formal places to have the conversations. We do not have them at the moment and that is linked to everything the Senator is talking about. We should not be talking about this now just because we are hearing this. It should be part of how we do our business all the time.

I thank the witnesses for their contributions, which have been very useful, and for their time and the work they do daily. I might begin with the opening statement from the Irish Prison Service.

It is really stark that over 70% of those in custody are struggling with addiction. That is heartbreaking when one thinks of the young lives that are being destroyed and how people exit education at 14 years of age. I have read the drugs strategy 2023-2026 and in many respects the service presents the ideal opportunity or ideal incubation space to test drug treatment, drug rehabilitation, addiction treatment and addiction rehabilitation and recovery. When I read the drugs strategy, I did not see a funding budget associated with it. Was a budget identified to fully implement the strategy? If so, has the service secured and been provided with that budget by the Department of Justice?

At present we spend about €4.5 million on addiction services. We continuously increase our investment in that regard. There are some specifics in the drugs strategy that we have sought funding for through the 2025 Estimates process, specifically the dual-diagnosis model. We have been working with the HSE to develop a dual-diagnosis pilot in Cork Prison. It would be jointly resourced. Both the HSE and ourselves have sought resources to get that model up and running. We know, and Ms Sarah Hume who is the acting head of psychology knows better, that a lot of people who present with an addiction issue have a co-morbidity with a mental health issue. We want to start dealing with people in a much more holistic way. There is no point in just dealing with the addiction. We need to see people and their problems as a whole person so that we can be effective.

That highlights the point Senator Ruane made in terms of us looking at a different model. We have 19 Merchants Quay addiction counsellors. We have a complement of 20 and we hope to fill the vacant post shortly. We have sought four additional addiction counsellors through the Estimates process for this year. Given the scale of the need, we need to start thinking differently and become a little bit more self-sufficient in terms of people who can provide support to those in addiction. We are being creative and the recovery model comes from that in terms of training people to be recovery coaches who are living within our prisons and who have been on that journey, and who can have accredited skills that they can use when they leave us and can continue that work and help others in the community. I ask my colleague, Ms Hume, to comment, if that is okay.

Yes. I want to hear from Ms Hume but I want to first ask a question. I cannot remember whether a witness said it at a previous meeting or whether it was as part of the citizens' assembly report, but I was really struck by the statistic that a large proportion of people entering the prison service with an addiction exit before they have an opportunity to avail of treatment or supports. I would appreciate if either the director general or Ms Hume can give me feedback on that.

The Senator did not misunderstand and it was probably me when I spoke at the citizens' assembly. Some 79% of everybody who comes to our custody every year comes for less than 12 months and of that group of people, 70% come for less than six months. With remission, one is looking at a sentence of four and a half months, so in terms of having treatment for addiction, that period is clearly insufficient to meet a person's need. It is one of the reasons we are working with Merchants Quay now because if we start somebody on a programme, or with a counsellor in the prison, we need to make sure that he or she is in a position to continue and do not lose any gains when he or she goes back out to his or her communities. I will ask Ms Hume to comment specifically on the Merchants Quay arrangement and our thinking there.

One of the recommendations by the assembly was that we should provide addiction services to everybody, even people serving less than 12 months. The reality is that if a person is in a custodial setting for four months or four and half months, it is very hard for us to provide a service. We also find that where people are serving short sentences, they do not have the motivation to actually address the root causes of their offending. They are in for a very short period, so they keep their head down and look at the gate. Whereas when people are with us serving longer sentences, we have a much greater ability to get under those root causes of offending and help people through addiction counselling or through the treatment and rehabilitation programme, TARP, or through psychological intervention to deal with the issues that contribute to the addiction.

Ms McCaffrey is right. We have a psychology service and MQI is the service provider. There are long wait lists, unfortunately. We have worked to recruit extra psychologists to fill capacity. Recently we had a competition and we hope to have full staffing in place. We are looking for additional staff through the Estimates process this year, which we hope will enhance our ability to meet the needs of people. We are monitoring data around people who get out of prison without access to the treatment they have been identified as needing. That data is helping to drive our decision-making around treatment provision. We are looking at whole-population approaches, particularly for people, as Ms McCaffrey said, who are not engaging in help-seeking behaviour.

The use of lived experience has been really critical in advising how we should try to engage people who are not contemplating change, do not see a problem with their behaviour and do not access help. That should help to bring people in. The use of peer support is critical if one wants to build trust and engagement. Talking to a psychologist is one thing but there are so many barriers to coming forward to speak to a psychologist. It is easier for people to come forward if they see a peer who has gone through the same experience, has that lived experience and has journeyed on the same road. We have found that that gives hope. For people who have seen people come back in to do work that gives hope and they need to see a role model for themselves.

I thank our guests for their attendance and my first question is for Ms Quigley. She said that for the first ten years when she started out there was genuine partnership. As almost 30 years have elapsed how would she describe the changes in the treatment for those people found with drugs? Has stigma reduced considering where we are now? What is her opinion?

No, the stigma has not reduced at all. We do not have any objective measures of stigma but there is no question whatsoever that the stigma has not reduced in any way. The fact that we are still criminalising people is the ultimate stigma. In terms of how it is covered by the media, the simplest way to describe it is that we are still in a moral judgment space with the drugs policy and that is the ultimate stigmatisation. This links in with the stuff in prisons as well. Once an issue is being dealt with in that sort of crime, bad behaviour, and bad people doing bad things space, which is where we still have it, then that is the ultimate stigma a State can put on people.

One cannot compare the current drug situation with what happened 30 years ago because it was entirely different then and was a completely different world. In 1995, we started to campaign on this issue in communities and it was with the belief, which sounds naive and silly now, that we were going to be able to solve this problem and end up removing drugs from our communities. Obviously that is what we thought at the time and we now know that is not going to happen.

What we have learned in that time is that it is not a future where there are no drugs and we have no drug problems. People will always use drugs and we will always have issues with drugs but we need to learn how to manage them. As I said at the start, in managing them, we have to look at the evidence and what it tells us. It tells us 100% clearly that the worst harms are still in the most disadvantaged and the poorest communities. That and the stigma are 100% related. At one stage, we were involved in a poll with RedC to try to measure stigma. One question people were asked was whether they would be okay living next door to someone who used drugs. Approximately 70% of people said no, they would not. We were having a conversation about it afterwards and asking how you would even know. For someone living in an average housing estate, their neighbour could be smoking cannabis or having cocaine on a Saturday and this person would not know and it would not bother them as it would have no impact on them. For most people who think of a person using drugs, they will see the person who is in serious trouble. Those are the people on the street who are visible. Immediately that is what people think of and that is massively stigmatising. However, we keep saying that people are not seeing a problem related to drug use but a problem related to poverty, homelessness, housing and failures of housing policy because no one chooses to use their drugs on the street if they have somewhere else they can be.

In ways, the problem has become more complex and more difficult. We have also learned very positive things about what can work and what can make a difference. There are many examples across every sector, whether it is statutory, prisons or elsewhere, of what works best, but the biggest problem now is that we are not building on that. We are going backwards because we have abandoned the fundamental principles that any kind of success we have had has come from partnership. Everybody accepts that and everybody knows there has to be an interagency approach. Again, the experience from Portugal shows that when it ended criminalisation, it was entirely a question of housing services, employment services and psychological services going with it. They have to.

According to the report on Irish prisons, the average school-leaving age among those in prison is 14. I know it myself from youth work and the GAA. It is an awful thing to say and I am not trying to categorise anyone but I can see a young person, look at the family and say they are in trouble. Where are the wrap-around services between social workers, Tusla and the schools? I have seen brilliant sportspeople who could have played for Cork or Ireland and who, by the time they are 12, 13 or 14, are gone. They have given up sport. For many people, there are many things they can do in school beyond the academic stuff, whether it is through arts, dance or sport. When we know that prisoners' average age leaving school is 14, then the key is to keep them in school. Ms Quigley made a point about a partnership approach and working together. Surely early intervention is needed - getting to these families and getting them the supports, because the children are the victims here. They will end up in Mountjoy or Cork prison afterwards because somewhere along the line, when there was a chance to help them, we missed it.

What the Deputy is talking about are exactly the kinds of conversations we were having back in 1996 when we were developing the drugs strategy at that stage. When the structures were set up with the national drugs strategy scheme and the task forces, it was with exactly what the Deputy is saying in mind. Obviously, it is the Government's responsibility to come up with the overall strategy, but the drug strategy team had representatives from all the key Departments and, as I said in my presentation, the key difference is that it is not just a committee. We have heard from members of this committee the frustration every time a new committee is set up. For the first few meetings everyone comes and then it fades out. What was different about the national drugs strategy team was that, for the civil servants and the representatives from agencies who were on it, it was half of their working week. For half the week, they were located as part of that team. They therefore all worked together in their day-to-day work, and that made a crucial difference in actually being able to deliver.

A very good example is what were called the CE drug projects, which are now the drug rehab projects. Everyone was sitting around a table and the issue would come up and was very visible in the community. When the methadone programmes had started and were expanding, one of the problems was that people on the programme had nothing to do all day. When someone is actively using drugs, they will be very busy because they constantly have to find them and so on, but when people went onto methadone, they had the rest of the day and that was not a good thing. I do not mean this in a derogatory way but normally a State agency's response will be that an issue is something for another agency, but in this instance the issue was put in the middle of the table, so to speak. Everyone was sitting around the table and asking what each could do about that. FÁS came forward and said it had CE schemes and they were 20 hours a week but perhaps it could adapt them. Then the VECs, as they were, suggested that they could include an education input into that and then the Department with responsibility for children would have come in with something else. It is that kind of thinking that is needed. I know it sounds so basic and common-sensical, but we do not operate like that normally. That is not the normal way. That is why I feel so passionate about it but people tell us you cannot do things that way.

Another key point is that the community representatives who were there at that table were part of the decision-making as well. We are now told that communities cannot be involved in the decision-making. They may be consulted but no more than that. It can be done. It was done and it worked and everybody benefited from it. Everybody felt they were part of something and that everyone was working together. That model is a long time gone. We need to name it, though, and say it is possible to do it within the Irish State structures. It is quite possible. All the people from the various agencies who were involved found it incredibly positive. It is so much more efficient because there are not all the crossovers that can happen otherwise.

There was the same model at local level and in the task forces on the ground. The idea is the overall direction is set at national level but its implementation on the ground, such as how more supports are provided for young children, might be very different in the Deputy's area in Cork than what we need to do in the north inner city in Dublin, for example, or a rural area in Offaly, for example. It might be different but the task forces were given the authority to say to people in local areas that they knew what was going on on the ground and they could make the decision on implementation. It is so efficient compared with someone at a high level nationally making the decision about it. We have lost all that.

I will finish on this because I could rant forever. We are now in a space, as one of the members of the committee who was chair of a task force noted, where the task forces have been totally sidelined. We have structures there and they are not being allowed or supported to do the job. Everybody recognises the need for interagency and integrated work, but what we are doing is going against it. Even the way the new funding for drugs is being directed goes against those principles of integration. There is massive frustration that there are very simple straightforward ways of doing it even if none are perfect and none solve the problem.

I noticed throughout the statement and when Ms Quigley talks about interagency partnership how there is a creeping centralisation towards very health-specific services that any of us on the ground will have seen. I represent Dublin 1 and Dublin 7. As everyone has said today, the issues are so much more complex. What Ms Quigley has described is similar to an extent to the model for the north-east inner city, NEIC, which has a specific sum of funding, which sits within the Department of the Taoiseach and everyone is around the table. Is that what Ms Quigley feels is the answer?

A key extra element is the involvement in policymaking. When we talk about community development, that is the core of it. It is people who have lived experience of the issue on the ground.

In our view, that includes people who use drugs, their families and the wider community, who are greatly impacted by the community drug problem. Community development is not just about developing and putting in place services and support on the ground, although that is a crucial part of it, but also about being involved in the policies.

An example is the NEIC, which operates across a range of different areas and provides resources for a range of activities and projects. One striking point is that the NEIC structure has nothing to do with housing or housing policy. Housing policy is a fundamental issue in an area like the north inner city. The drugs issue is massively affected by the housing crisis, and all of the related issues around crime, imprisonment and mental health are affected by it. Therefore, housing policy is at the core of this. In earlier days, it was part of the national drugs strategy and it would have been seen as part of the role of the councils on the task force to address housing policy. That is gone. It is now seen as operating through one particular programme, Housing First. While it is brilliant that that is there, it is just a programme.

I have some questions for the Prison Service. My questions will be intensely practical because I am trying to understand how the prisons work with regard to testing, access to naloxone and the issue of the recent mass overdose. We heard from other contributors at this committee that there is always a struggle to get suitable testing on site for anything, whether it relates to festivals or a particular neighbourhood. I am trying to understand what the Prison Service has access to. Is it easy or acceptable for prisoners to seek testing, anonymously or otherwise? I know that is a strange place for the Prison Service to put itself, given the security issue. Can prisoners seek testing? Does the Prison Service have access to suitable testing facilities, services and labs? I know other groups do not. What happens afterwards if that testing happens and the Prison Service identifies something, although not necessarily through a very sad overdose?

I will deal with this in terms of the substances themselves, although maybe not from an operational point of view. We currently have two mechanisms by which we can get substances tested. Neither of them is very satisfactory, in my view. The first is that if a substance is seized within the prison, which happens regularly, the substance is stored securely and we await the arrival of members of An Garda Síochána to pick up the substance, transport it to the Forensic Science Ireland lab and get a result. Unfortunately, it can take weeks to months before we get a result on that substance.

That is one way of getting a substance tested. The other option is that if there has been a clinical incident in a prison relating to a substance, that is, an overdose or even an unfortunate fatality, we have access to the National Drug Treatment Centre laboratory on Pearse Street, which will give us a result within 24 to 48 hours.

Yes. We are closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Unfortunately, that is where we are at. We are making strong efforts to try to improve that. I am engaging with the Department of Health to try to improve our access to real-time testing so we have forewarning. To be prewarned is to be prepared. We want to get forewarning of what is present in our prisons.

I welcome the witnesses. I do not want to be giving plaudits or throwing roses in front of them, but they are all doing very important work and that comes across in their statements and their passion when talking on this subject.

I have some experience of how the prison system works as I spent time helping out at Aiséirí in Waterford, where people come from the penal system to take programmes on how to manage their addiction and the other issues that are going on in their lives. A lot of that involves psychological understanding. With regard to prison management, do the witnesses see a difference between those prisoners who are in for the short term compared with those who are there for longer sentences with regard to how they engage on these issues? I imagine that someone who is in for more than a couple of years might decide to completely tune out and just use drugs to be in oblivion all of the time, if they can manage it. At the same time, the system can get at them and get them to try to think of entering a programme to help them to understand how they might get out in the future. How does that work within the prison system? Are the longer term prisoners a help or a hindrance in terms of what the Prison Service is trying to achieve in getting drugs out of the system?

It is a good point. One of the difficulties is that when people are serving shorter sentences, they tend to be less open to seeking help so as not to be in that space. We have engaged people with lived experience and we use them very well in this space. We can provide all of the services we have to a person but the inner motivation needs to come from the person themselves. What we now believe is they need to see hope for a different future. A clinician, a governor or a member of the prison staff can encourage you, but if you can talk to a peer who has been on the same journey you have been on, who has the same issues you have had and has turned their life around, that is very helpful.

We do a couple of things in terms of using people with lived experience. We have people with lived experience co-facilitating group psychology programmes, which we have seen to be of great effect. We run a mental health week every year in our prisons and that is predominantly driven by people with lived experience. The Two Norries make content for our television channel that we can play in all of the cells. We do a lot. Certainly, where people are with us for a longer sentence, they have an opportunity to use the time to get underneath the issues that give rise to their offending.

I will ask our head of psychology to come in on that point.

We tend to see that when people come back for a second sentence, that is a motivator because they find themselves in the same situation as before. That can often be the change agent, particularly when they have matured a little and perhaps have a family at home. To have a child in the community is a huge motivator for change.

We try to catch the ingredients we need to see to make the difference in people's lives. As the director general said, long sentences give people an opportunity to really address their problems over time. Early on, they tend not to reach out for support but over time we see greater engagement as sentences progress.

It is my perception, rightly or wrongly, that drugs are probably used as a currency in prison and as a coercive element. It strikes me that when we are trying to create drug-free prisons, we are going to have resistance within the system itself. Obviously, there are people who are addicted and do not want to go through the difficulties of challenging their addiction unless they are met head-on with the necessity of having to do a form of managed cold turkey or whatever it is going to be. I suspect there is that resistance in some of the prisons to what is trying to be implemented in terms of drug-free prisons because, ultimately, that change would take part of the power away from the people involved, reduce their ability to coerce people and perhaps take their income away, on the inside or the outside, however that works. How is this challenge managed? There must be a particular awareness of certain people in the prisons for whom trying to deliver any kind of change of this type is anathema.

Organised criminal gangs are definitely involved in the drug trade in our prisons. One of our objectives in our drugs strategy was to work more comprehensively with An Garda Síochána. We have now set up a great model of cross-engagement between the Prison Service and An Garda Síochána. One aspect is targeting those people trafficking drugs into our prisons, while others involve sharing intelligence and helping with security operations. We are, therefore, doing a great deal with An Garda Síochána to target those people fuelling the availability of drugs in our prisons. Governor Treacy might speak to this issue as well. Many people who have addictions and are using drugs in prison might prefer not to be in that position. It is about trying to shift our approach in terms of helping them into recovery. This is what is behind the recovery model approach we are now trying to take.

From my experience in the Prison Service, we have people coming into custody and for short sentences. We know that when they come into custody they might have contraband internally or this type of thing. We do our best to try to monitor that and see how we can combat it. As the director general said, we work with our colleagues in An Garda Síochána. We get intelligence off the floor. Prisoners come to us with intelligence. We have intelligence-led searching, random searching, drug tests and this type of thing. It is really a kind of game of cat and mouse. We might find an avenue where contraband is coming into our prisons and we work to close it up, but then another way might be found. Visits are one way we look at. We have had incidents with drone incursions coming into our prisons. We worked with An Garda Síochána recently and there was a significant arrest in this regard. We have seen a reduction in this type of activity in our prison.

Is there a rationale for potentially trying to separate out prisoners within the system if the intelligence indicates there are people managing the circulation of drugs and coercing people around drug use or drug debt, and then there are other people the system would be identifying, whether it is the psychological services or whatever, who potentially want to engage in having better self-understanding and getting past their addictions and, hopefully, to manage them? Is there a rationale in trying to separate out those people from the general population and just trying to work on those people on a different avenue? We would be doing this with the understanding that there are going to be some people in prison, probably for a longer time, potentially, who are not going to change. They are in custody for however long, and if they are not going to engage with the system, they will constantly be head-butting against it. Are there some people there with whom we could have a far more dramatic impact but it would be necessary to secure them away from those other influences in the prison? Is that a feasible thought or is it possible? I just want to understand.

What the Deputy said is accurate. When we get intelligence regarding people involved in the importation of contraband into our prisons, we work collectively with our colleagues around the estates to transfer that person or maybe to use the mechanisms of our prison rules to detain that person, whether that is under a specific rule, to protect our prison population. We work closely with our different directors regarding removing that threat from our prisons to a different location.

Returning to my point, though, is there rationale in terms of the prison rehabilitative programme in trying to separate people out early when they come into custody to try to keep them away from those other influences and people who are going to coerce or manage them or whatever, and to do this in the hope that it would be possible to have a far more pronounced effect, hopefully, on the future on of those people thus separated? I refer to trying to show them that we will protect them from those other people and that we will put them in with like-minded people. It would be a form of peer association where everybody in that situation would all be together trying to get a better understanding so they could look to have a better future away from the problems they had to date.

We have Wheatfield Prison. The intention was that it would be a work training prison for young people, but we have never been able to give effect to that because of an ever-increasing prison population. We have 4,500 beds and just under 5,000 people in custody today. We have massive overcrowding. Our prison population has increased by over 1,000 people in the last two years. Some of that has given rise to the increases in the waiting lists and just some of the complexity of need we are seeing within the prison population. We are certainly not ruling out what was mentioned, especially in the context of people who have been through the recovery model and come out the other side. We are looking at having drug-free communities and how we can manage that. Given the pressure on the system now, however, it is very difficult to be able to make those decisions because, quite frankly, we do not have enough beds for the number of people in custody. This makes it extremely difficult to do what the Deputy suggested, but he makes a very good point.

I thank the director general. This is something that needs to be brought up publicly with the Department of Justice. We have an opportunity to intervene with what is probably a significant number of people going through the prison system who can be successfully interdicted and who can have changes in their lives. It is not going to happen, however, when they are in prison with other people who are controlling, coercing and intimidating them. These are, of course, the facts on the ground. This is a matter of resourcing and of space. As I said, though, I must take my hat off to the witnesses in respect of the work being done. It is very difficult and I know a significant contribution is being made to many people's lives. It might not be seen, but I am sure it is being seen by those in the Prison Service and that will give them the satisfaction to keep doing it. What we are trying to get, though, is an overall, holistic understanding of how we can better get at these problems and try to isolate those people who are hindering the system and help those who want to be helped and can be helped.

I thank the witnesses from the Prison Service and Citywide Drugs Crisis Campaign for being here today. It is extremely useful hearing what they have to say. I am glad Ms McCaffrey raised the issue of prison overcrowding because, as we saw earlier this year, it went over the 5,000-people mark. Locally, because Mountjoy Prison is very close to where I am based, I am seeing prisoners being moved out of the progression unit there. These are prisoners who were making great progress but who are now back in the main prison. It is soul-destroying to see the great progress they have made when we are now probably going to see a regression, which is really regrettable. I just want to get an understanding from the witnesses as to where they see prison numbers going this year because this will have a knock-on impact on everything we are talking about today.

Yes. It is difficult. We know what impacts the people we have in custody. It is an increase in the strength of the Garda force, having more judges, having more court sittings, having new offences and increases in sanctions for existing offences. All these factors serve to increase the numbers in custody. There is, though, no formal way of assessing the impact when those decisions are made and no way to plan for the space that will be required in future in the prison system. This is where we find ourselves.

It is not the first overcrowding crisis we have had. I have been in the Prison Service a long time and we saw a dramatic increase in the prison population in the late 2000s, up to 2011. Between 2011 and 2018, the prison population dropped and stabilised. Since 2018, however, the numbers have been on the rise again. Covid-19 interrupted that and allowed us to drop the prison population to 3,600 people. We now, however, have 1,400 more prisoners in the system than we did during Covid-19.

We are doing a lot with regard to capital. This year, we will bring on more than 155 spaces as part of short-term works. We also have short-term plans for 2025. More broadly, we have received additional funding as part of the national development plan for additional infrastructure and we have some big projects.

The remand population is one of the groups behind the massive increase. In 2015, the remand population in Ireland was approximately 500. It is routinely more than 1,000 now. In our female prisons, remand prisoners make up well over 30% of the population. An increase in the remand population is driving the increase. We only have one dedicated remand centre in Ireland, Cloverhill Prison. We have a major construction project that we are working through the gateways of the public spending code. Separately, with regard to 2030 and beyond, a future capacity group established by the Minister for Justice is examining what spaces we need and how to bring them on stream. We need to remember that prison is a very costly sanction. It costs almost €90,000 a year to keep somebody in custody. There is, therefore, a strong focus in the Department of Justice on alternatives to custodial sanctions for people serving short sentences. There has been a lot of work and contemplation on what would constitute an effective, community-based sanction that is not necessarily imprisonment, bearing in mind that 79% of people committed to a custodial sentence come for less than 12 months. Quite a lot of work is taking place. We are feeling huge pressure at the moment.

Certain categories within the cohort of prisoners are growing. One such category is the sex offender cohort. Historically, the majority of the sex offenders were placed in Arbour Hill Prison. We then expanded that to the Midlands Prison and now we have to expand that even further. We now have sex offenders in Castlerea Prison. Regrettably, we need to look at where we can house people safely and securely. We had to make that decision regarding the progression unit.

We have to deal with the demographics we have, and our options are quite limited in terms of the estate. The majority of our accommodation is medium secure accommodation and we are challenged in trying to come up with solutions. In some cases, we have had to make decisions we might not like to make, given that we have had more than 1,000 prisoners in our care in the previous two years. This morning, approximately 250 people are sleeping on a mattress on the floor of another person's cell. This is having a huge impact. It fuels greater drug taking because overcrowding has a real impact on people in our care. It challenges us in providing services. The waiting lists get longer. We have a finite number of education and work training spaces. We are deeply conscious of that and we are doing as much as we can in the short term but we are challenged in terms of overcrowding.

The figure Ms McCaffrey presented that approximately 80% of those committed to custody have an addiction issue is very stark. I heard what she said about the range of health supports and psychology services that are in place. Are any educational or psychological assessments or supports put in place? We know there is a high correlation between undiagnosed, additional education needs and addiction or people not making the best decisions for their lives down the line. Does that happen as standard within the Prison Service? Has any work been done on that?

I will speak broadly about the demographics of those we have in our custody. The statistic on early school leaving is stark, as are the statistics on addiction. We estimate that approximately 28% of people in our care have an IQ below 70. That is a real challenge in terms of learning and can be part of the reason people disengaged from mainstream education when they were younger. We also estimate that more than 60% of people in our custody have a personality disorder. The level of acuity of need is massive. I raise "The Two Norries" again. We have heard, particularly from Timmy, who is one of the hosts of "The Two Norries", how transformative it was for him to get a diagnosis of dyslexia in a custodial setting because it completely changed his perspective and his view of himself. It is terrible that people need to get to a custodial setting to get a diagnosis of dyslexia. We do not have the resources that we require.

The Department of higher education and the Irish Prison Service have a task force looking at prison education. Set up by the Taoiseach when he was Minister for Justice, it is important in trying to look at these issues. I will ask my colleague, Sarah Hume, to comment on what we are trying to do to help people get those diagnoses, which are critical in unlocking their potential.

If we come across someone in custody who has an identified difficulty with learning or neurodiversity, we will look for an assessment. We have to outsource assessments at the moment because we do not have capacity to do it in-house. A prison officer might identify someone who needs an assessment. Members would be surprised at how many people in their 40s or 50s we pick up who have not been diagnosed. That is transformational when it happens. We try our best to identify the people who need an assessment and we organise that. There are people who do not come to our attention who fall between the cracks. We do not have a system for identifying everybody. The service relies on the training of staff to pick up where there is a particular presentation.

We have an incredible education provision within our prisons. It would be remiss of me not to thank the Department of Education. We have 220 whole-time equivalent teachers who are assigned to run the most vibrant adult education centres in our prison. They meet people where they find them. It is really transformative for people who might have dropped out of mainstream education or who have not had a good experience to go to an education centre which has an adult education approach, meets people where they are and is very supportive. The approach covers basic literacy all the way up to Open University. A huge proportion of the prison population is engaging in education. It is not just the leaving certificate or junior certificate. It is based on Quality and Qualifications Ireland, QQI, and what people are interested in and might help them secure employment when they leave. It is creative arts. It is great for so many people to find that they have incredible talents they never knew existed. It is also really sad, however, that people come to prison and find out they are musically creative or incredibly artistic but they only ever have that talent nurtured in a custodial setting. It says something about how we maintain those children and re-nourish and nurture those talents in order for people to see a different future for themselves that they might not see at the time.

I understand that. They are on the periphery or beyond it. I was not going to take this line of questioning until I heard that figure. Gardaí are sometimes the first port of call when dealing with mental health issues. Some cases are dealt with well, while others are not. We have a bad history in that regard. We completely overrode people's human rights at one time, when any man in a suit could have somebody sectioned in an institution. While we have since moved away from that, we did not move to a scenario of looking after people who need supports, are a danger to themselves or are spiralling. I have seen cases where great gardaí have brought people in front of great judges. Forgive my terminology, but these involved almost forcing medical care and people being told they would only be released on a certain basis.

I remember the names of disaster cases. In one particular case, a fella was causing a huge number of issues for everybody in his community. I cannot even remember his name because it got dealt with at that stage. He had to take an injection at the time. It was three months. It was just one of those few successes, but I imagine that is not always the case. We have heard this in the public domain. The Prison Service is dealing with a great many people who have not had diagnoses or those supports at an early stage. It is also dealing with a huge number of people with mental health issues who are in the wrong place. I accept they have probably broken the law and created a huge amount of hassle for other people but, again, that is our inability to provide those supports.

In terms of severe and enduring mental illness, we have an inreach service from the National Forensic Mental Health Service and at present it has a caseload of 350 within our prisons. Those are generally people with psychosis or schizophrenia who are being managed in a custodial setting. I think everybody recognises and accepts that a prison is not a therapeutic environment. It is incredibly challenging for us. We have some specialised units where we manage people with a huge acuity of need. We have a unit in Mountjoy Prison and an area in Cloverhill Prison.

As regards remand prisoners, the National Forensic Mental Health Service runs a court diversion programme from Cloverhill Prison and it is very successful in diverting people from custody. They generally come into our custody and are then diverted. There is a very successful programme there in terms of diversion, but we have many men who are very unwell being committed to Cloverhill Prison and who then go on to access forensic beds within the community. We also have access to the Central Mental Hospital. We have had an increase in beds through the opening of the new Central Mental Hospital and an increase in admissions to the Central Mental Hospital. Since the new hospital has opened, we have had over 70 admissions there.

I think there is a high awareness around the issues the Deputy has raised. A number of years ago, a mental health task force was set up between the Prison Service, the Department of Justice and the Department of Health specifically to look at these issues. There were a number of recommendations that have been worked through, on both the health side and the justice side and for ourselves. We are looking to see if we can improve the service we can provide to people who are acutely unwell while they are in our care. We have a medical unit, which is where our high support unit is located in Mountjoy. We are currently refurbishing that. The plan for the future - if we did not have overcrowding, it would be the plan now - is that that would become a bespoke unit that might be co-led and co-managed with forensic psychiatric staff in order that we could help people waiting to go to the Central Mental Hospital and to come back. It is a really significant challenge, however, and I pay tribute to our staff, not only our healthcare staff but also our prison officers, who provide incredible care and compassion to some of the most vulnerable and unwell people we have in this country. They go above and beyond, recognising that no matter how much we do, it will not be enough to treat that person because we are not a treatment centre in the context of the Mental Health Act.

The mistakes have all happened before they land with the Prison Service. I imagine there is a huge crossover as well with drug addiction and drug abuse. That goes without saying.

This goes back to the earlier discussion because in some cases we are trying to fight poverty, which we have failed to do, and we have not put those supports in. Drugs are everywhere. There is not a bar in Ireland where people are not snorting cocaine. The impact cocaine has, particularly in working-class areas, is phenomenal, from the drug debt intimidation right down to the impact it has on addicts, with multigenerational trauma and so on. Then there is a huge impact on other people within the community. Sometimes people think that looking at something that might facilitate addiction is going soft on these people, but it is a fact that we do not have that holistic solution. Every bit of this is creaking and failing and we are not putting the supports out. We are not breaking poverty. We are not dealing with multigenerational trauma. We are leaving people in chaotic circumstances. Someone said that if you sit in a barber's chair long enough, you will get a haircut. People end up falling into drug dealing and going down other routes. Do not get me wrong - there is still a need, in working-class areas more than anywhere else, to deal with what has become normalised drug dealing, criminality and thuggery. I am not even sure that is a question, but we are not even starting to deal with any of this. I was going to ask a question about drug-free communities in jail because I imagine that is near impossible. As much as the Prison Service is trying to find and catch issues, I imagine that if it adopted a zero-tolerance policy, it would create a major headache with medical issues, management issues and all the other issues that we can all imagine.

I agree 100% with Ms McCaffrey. The fact that we see numbers going into prison increasing in the way described is a huge judgment on our failure to deal with those underling issues. Whether we are looking at people who develop serious addiction problems or people who end up in prison, there are the same underlying issues. One of the key things I think we have gone wrong on is that now we look at issues like poverty and inequality as an individual problem. Now, clearly, it is a problem for the individuals experiencing it, but we did have quite a period in our policy when we recognised that there are certain communities, working-class communities, even though that phrase is not used much any more, where there is a concentration of these problems. That understanding of a concentration in a geographic community is lost. There is almost a view in broader policy that poverty is not really something we experience in Ireland any more. At the height of the heroin epidemic, the national figure for heroin use was maybe only 3% of people. It was a figure that would look very low.

If you were to look at the figure, you would say it is not a problem. In the communities in which it was concentrated, it was devastating, and we have lost that analysis. It is a class analysis that looks fundamentally at there being an extra layer of impact when there is concentration and a high number of people experiencing the same problems, none of whom have the financial resources to get services privately. It is interesting, however, that the whole issue of neurodiversity has come really strongly onto our agenda in Citywide after all this time. People are beginning to realise the massive connection but, again, we have totally lost that community focus. It is about individuals. That goes back to the moral idea that we have individuals doing wrong things. We need, as part of the need for community development, to understand and recognise that we still have geographical areas, communities, experiencing much lower levels of income, of all social provision, of all the access to social capital and so on than other people. That is another layer on top of the individual's experience and it provides the context for the continuation of-----

We do not. It is another agency of people, but the Combat Poverty Agency we had, when it was independent, had its own independent board. It was keeping that issue, it was pushing us and it supported community development. At the end of the day, the only people who will really be interested in pushing these issues are the people in these communities. There was stuff recently about people voting in elections and turnouts. We all know, looking at the parallel, the correlation, between the areas experiencing most poverty, that most of these issues we are talking about relate to the areas with the lowest turnout. It is like, "That is the way things are", but that is not good enough. We need to get back to having that very strong community focus.

I will have to leave after this; I have an event across the road. I am sorry for walking in and out. I am actually quite upset. I did not expect to be upset so I apologise. The statistics are quite hard because they relate to my friends and my community. It is very hard to sit here and listen to the debate.

Prison has played a consistent role in my life. I had to visit it and bring my daughter there for many years. I continue to do work in respect of it. I also got phone calls to tell me that friends had overdosed in cells and died. I need to say this because Ms McCaffrey, Ms Hume and Mr. Treacy - I have not worked directly with Mr. Treacy - have opened the doors for me to do many different things within the prison, which I am grateful for. It is because of that gratitude for the projects they let me do that I often probably sideline acknowledging the truth of the situation, namely that many people do not feel the benefits of the things we are talking about. This is a societal problem; it is the poverty in communities. The witnesses get the brunt of it because they can congregate them all in one space, and I acknowledge that. It is like the idea of the republic of opportunity and taking that model into a prison. All of the barriers to those opportunities have to be removed, whether it is access to laptops for Open University or access to pens that can help people with dyslexia to read without their being told that they cannot have them because they look like weapons.

I refer to the culture. Many prison officers have gone above and beyond to help me do some outrageous stuff in that prison in terms of projects sometimes. However, there is a culture that also exists in there that is working very hard against the men in there. They are working very hard with judgment and stigmatisation. I cannot imagine that a politician from a more established party would feel it in the same way that I do when I go in. There is a toxic culture that also exists within the prison system that is in complete contradiction to any sort of rehabilitative model.

The statistics reminded me of the people behind them. The recovery model is great, as well as everything that is going on with the vision of where it can be. Something is missing, however. In the context of short sentences, the prison system should not be seen as an opportunity for treatment. It is so messed up that a person’s liberty should be taken away before that person gets to access something. That is a societal thing. It should not be put on the prison system. However, the Prison Service needs to also speak out about its own systems and what is absolutely failing. We are probably speaking about it too positively. If an audit was of everyone in the prison system’s experience were carried out, I do not think our conversation today would match what they would feed into it. I refer to people who are serving longer sentences. Longer sentences negatively impacts on people's health. The science is there to show this; it is evidence-based. On the other hand, we say that people who are serving longer sentences will be able to get the help they need. These things are contradictory, but it makes sense because of course you can work with people for longer.

Then there is the idea of not stigmatising people, admitting there is a minority of people controlling the drug supply into the prison and carpet raiding cells and carpet testing people because of the small number involved. We must then ask why we are testing people. Are we testing them to use as pawns in the bigger picture in order to ask who is bringing it in? Something is missing from this conversation regarding my understanding of the men I have worked with my entire life. I have men who have taken lives and I have men who have had friends who have had their lives taken. I know both sides - perpetrator and victim. I have been in both camps. They are not always mutually exclusive. Often, the victims of crime become the perpetrators of crime, or the victims of violence become the perpetrators of violence. They are not necessarily two distinct groups.

It is not so much of a question but I ask that it be acknowledged here that with all the great endeavours of the Prison Service and in respect of society, poverty and all of these things, we are institutionalising people with low IQs, low levels of educational attainment and mental health disorders. The crime is a side aspect in some of those things. We are institutionalising poor people. Forget trying to introduce programmes and forget short sentences; can we all just not fight against the fact that Ireland is institutionalising poor people and mentally unwell people instead of finding better alternatives than the prison system in the first place? It is so messed up.

My heart was hurting so much when I heard the statistics because I was seeing the faces of the people I love crossing my mind when they were coming up. I felt I could not leave today without acknowledging that many of them should not be there in the first place. It is a complete failure on the part of the State that there are so many people in the prison system.

I do not expect anyone to even attempt to comment on that. I just felt I needed to advocate for a community that is not represented here at the table. I know that is who we all care about. Something is missing from the conversation when we are acknowledging that things are going seriously wrong with what we are doing in the context of sending people to prison in the first place. It has to end.

I appreciate the Senator’s candour and honesty. There is a paradigm shift within the Prison Service in respect of our role and purpose. Historically, we have seen prisons as places of punishment where people who have done bad things go. That has been the philosophy and the modus operandi. All of our focus was around safety and security. There has been a paradigm shift in how we see our role and function now. We see ourselves serving society, communities and the people in our care. Even talking about people as being in our care is a recognition of the paradigm shift to operate in a person-centred way and to try to work with individuals to unlock their potential.

I do not pretend for a second that the Prison Service is perfect. However, I am passionately committed, as the Senator knows, to ensuring that we continue to create an environment where people can have those opportunities. It is very complex. The safety and security element still needs to be there because I am responsible for my staff as well my prisoners. We are committed within our service. There are many positive aspects of our culture and the vast majority of our staff are committed to and passionate about what they do and want to help people change. We are undertaking a culture audit where we can assess what the presenting issues are and how we can get under them.

There is also a piece around the relationships between two groups of people. There are responsibilities on both sides in terms of what they bring to the table and how they behave. That is complex and difficult. We need people not to continue their offending behaviour behind bars so that we can really do that. It is complex. There is a tension between the rehabilitation piece and the safety and security piece. I am passionately committed to driving real change within our prisons. We are all passionately committed on our side to giving the best services to the people in our care.

I recognise that the people in our care have fallen through every safety net that should have picked them up in the community. We then have a distilled population in the Prison Service. I do not have a magic wand to resolve all of the issues, such as low-level educational attainment, economic circumstances, childhood trauma and lack of work skills or training. I do not have a magic wand but what we do have is committed services that work hard every day to try to equip people with those skills. There is a certainly a piece around how there is a pipeline from school to prison. We need to break that pipeline. We need to start with the children in the communities who are suffering adverse childhood experiences, not necessarily through any fault of their own, or their parents or families, but because of the complexity of issues that exist within those communities. That is where we need to start.

Ironically, people tell me that prison does not work. Prison works because people have access to all the services they need in one place. Those services are wrapped around them and there are no barriers to their being accessed. There may be waiting lists, which we would rather not have, but there are not any barriers. The difficulty in the community is when they leave our custody and have made gains. Those services do not exist in the community and they need an accessible, holistic way where there is arm around them to help them access those services. It goes back to what Ms Quigley passionately spoke about.

This conversation reflects exactly the point I made earlier. This conversation is happening because this committee is here, but this is exactly the kind of conversation that should be an in-built part of how we do our business as a State. We can have a conversation here and people can see the point of the different perspectives. People will listen respectfully and nobody is saying, “You can’t say that” or “You are wrong, I am right”. We do not have that built into our system now. If Senator Ruane was saying her piece and Ms McCaffrey was saying hers, straight away they would be seen by people as arguing with each other and objecting to one other. That is not the case, however. They are giving their perspectives. Ms McCaffrey is giving her perspective from running the Prison Service and Senator Ruane is giving her perspective as someone who is massively involved in her community and from all her experience. We should absolutely acknowledge in theory that we need all of those voices around the table.

I am obviously specifically talking about the drugs issue but, as we say, they are all related. We need all of those voices at the table. If they are at the table in a proper structure that is ongoing, then it moves us on from these silos we have. Especially from the community side, as soon as we say anything that is seen as being in any way critical, it is seen as, "Here they go again." It is not. As I said, there are many people in the statutory sector who do not think that way.

Where can this conversation happen? At the moment, nowhere. I again make the point that in the original structures of the drugs strategy, which was not perfect, there was an openness to having that space and a recognition that people would come in with very different views and experiences, but we would all benefit from it. It is simple but, as a State, we are getting worse instead of better at doing it. We need to accept that and seriously do something about it. We discuss the issues and then say we need a structure to move on, but we use the same model of structures all the time, which we come back to.

We have been engaging with the national clinical director for the dual diagnosis programme. We have decided, based on community resources, that Cork will be the best fit to implement a pilot for the Prison Service. I cannot think of a better - excuse the pun - captive audience than those in prisons who would really benefit from these services. I cannot think of a better place-----

Cork is a good fit because it has good community services. There is already an established dual diagnosis team in the community there so we thought we would go with Cork. We put two streams together for the dual diagnosis programme. There is a huge continuum and spectrum of people, from those who have major mental illness to those who have mental health difficulties and major addiction problems, and those who have substance use-----

The one thing that strikes me about that is Cork Prison is full. From what I can gather, all the prisons are full. Ms McCaffrey spoke about maybe having whole wings where people who are in recovery and have lived experience would support each other, which is a brilliant concept. People would then be given the space to go along the recovery journey. That kind of model in prisons seems to be very much about thinking outside the box. It is utilising prison, which is a punishment for people, in a way that has a positive effect. The problem is that if there is such overcrowding in prisons, how will we be able to separate those prisoners who want to move on with their recovery from those who do not? Some people who are in the throes of addiction want to stay that way. That is their choice, but the people who want to be in recovery need to be given the space and the supports.

The fact that 600 prisoners engage in addiction counselling is great. That is brilliant, and it seems like a huge number. However, the next number is the 800 prisoners who are waiting, which is an even bigger number. What is in place for them? On prison numbers, is there a plan to roll out additional spaces or prisons? The one thing I will say is I hope the old prison in Cork is not one of those. The Glen already has a prison. The community there has suffered a great deal from having a prison, never mind having the old one up and running again. I would not be supportive of that for the community I represent. It is obvious that additional spaces are needed. There was talk about a super-prison at one time, which was shelved. Where will the capacity be? Do we need the capacity when so many people are in there for short periods? Do not get me wrong; violent criminals, sex offenders and those who are a danger to society should be in prison, no matter what happened in their past. I am sorry for that, but there are people who have to be in prison because they are a danger to society.

The point was made, however, that the average time spent in prison is four and a half months. For a lot of these people, addiction is the issue. Do they really need to be in prison? Ms Quigley made the point that surely we can come together to find out and put structures in place, where these people would get the treatment and support they need to keep them out of prison and in recovery, if they want. I know there was a lot there.

In response to Senator Sherlock, quite an amount work is happening on penal policy and looking at alternatives to custody for people serving short-term sentences, and what might be more appropriate and effective community-based sanctions. Much work is happening in that space with the Department of Justice and the Probation Service.

On additional prison spaces, we have plans that will deliver 1,200 additional spaces between now and 2030. The Minister has established a future capacity group to look beyond 2030 as regards the spaces we need. We have had quite a stable imprisonment rate for the past ten years. It is approximately 72 per 100,000. It has increased massively in the past few years and is now at 93 per 100,000. As part of that future capacity group, there will also be a piece of work that looks at demand. What is driving the increase in the prison population at present? That should be done before we commit a lot of resources to building prisons, which is very costly, and staffing prisons, which is incredibly costly. A prison space costs €90,000 a year and it costs more than €500,000 to build a prison space. It is a significant investment of resources. A lot of work is happening to see what constitutes a more effective community-based sanction, especially for people who might have presenting issues around addiction or mental health.

It could sound utopian that we have recovery units. We need to stop using the term "drug-free units" because that is very challenging. For example, in some prisons we have introduced an attempt or endeavour to get people to stop smoking. We have non-smoking wings. It is possible. We have to challenge ourselves. It would be too easy to say we cannot do any of these things because of overcrowding, but because of overcrowding it becomes more important that we do these things to keep people safe and make sure they have the supports in place. We will certainly work it out. We are looking at the medical unit and, as part of our capital plans, to build on Mountjoy. We have demolished a unit there. It will be interesting what that might look like. It may not necessarily be traditional prison spaces but something else that would be a more therapeutic environment and community. It is challenging but we have to challenge ourselves in how we can deliver it.

Currently, it is not. We are just about to conclude a feasibility study that is looking at that site and what it might provide us. The new Cork Prison provided additional capacity, which was maximised very quickly. Today, Cork Prison is chronically overcrowded. I do not have the numbers, but there are at least 30 or 40 prisoners more in that prison than it has capacity for. There is a requirement for additional accommodation in Munster.

On our plans for between now and 2030, we are looking at Cloverhill Prison, which is a remand prison, because there has been a massive increase in the number of people being remanded to prison. We are also looking at Mountjoy Prison, where we have a site, Castlrea Prison, where we are building modular housing accommodation because we can do that very quickly, primarily for the sex offender population, and the Midlands Prison, where we have room for one additional wing and plans are in place. Those are the capital plans we are currently considering.

It was said that €4.5 million is currently being spent on addiction services in prisons. Is that enough? It obviously is not if 800 people are waiting. What is the figure the Prison Service hopes it will be granted in the upcoming budget? If Ms Quigley had one ask from the budget, what would it be? What is the Prison Service's ask in the context of dealing with people with addiction issues?

We have included a resource request as part of our Estimates 2025 bid around addiction. We currently have 19 Merchant's Quay Ireland counsellors in place. We would like to increase that number to 24 next year. We also need to be mindful of how difficult it can be, particularly for Merchant's Quay Ireland and other community sectors, to attract people into those posts. We have had difficulties in terms of having posts we quite simply have not been able to fill. We are working with Merchant's Quay Ireland in that regard. We have requested a modest increase. Obviously, it will not be sufficient to provide a service to everybody. It comes back to our hope. We are also working with Narcotics Anonymous Ireland, NAI, and Alcoholics Anonymous, AA, to really increase and enhance the services they are providing within our prisons.

The recovery model is aimed at training people who are in custody to be recovery coaches. We are also doing addiction studies training. I would like people in custody to get a qualification with regard to addiction counselling and, in time, maybe they would be the people we would pay to provide that service while they are in custody. Then, it is a skill they can go on to use when they are in the community. We need to challenge our thinking. We need to stop always thinking about bringing resources into the prisons because even bringing a resource into the prison has huge issues from a governor's perspective in terms of escorts and security. We must see how we can grow and develop those skills within our lived experience population to support each other in terms of recovery specifically.

At the moment, it is specifically around the national drug strategy funding. A certain amount goes to the Department of Health, which then goes to the HSE. What we need to see, and obviously I would say this, but it is absolutely true and all of you have talked about the lack of investment, is a really significant amount of money being allocated to the national drug strategy, but allocated for an integrated strategy. As it was back in 1996 originally, the allocation that was made was for an integrated strategy. Again, it is backing up the experience and really strong message from Portugal when we are moving towards decriminalisation.

The other services like housing supports and employment supports are not optional extras. They are part of dealing with the addiction issue. It is that budget that is given to where we need that national structure. I am using the example of the national drug strategy team because that was in place for more than 12 or 13 years. It was a structure that worked very well within the context of how the Irish Civil Service works. Therefore, we know it can work if the will is there to do it. There needs to be that inter-agency structure and it needs to be led from the highest level. There was a Cabinet sub-committee at the time that the NDST linked into, but we need a national drug strategy budget that goes to an inter-agency committee that has all of the key players on it, and it has to be a significant budget. That committee will sit then and look at all these issues, as we are doing here, and the relationship between them rather than what is happening at the moment. First, the amount is tiny at the moment, but it goes to the Department of Health and HSE and follows their particular channel. Obviously, that is needed, but it is not what we did with that programme.

That is one of the issues. Many of the recommendations that came from the citizens' assembly are for supports, whether it is in the Irish Prison Service, the local drug and alcohol task forces or the community support and addiction services. There are a lot of really good positive recommendations in the citizens' assembly. However, one worry I always have is that resources have to be front-loaded if we are making changes. It is like building houses. During the boom, we built thousands of house but no crèches, schools, playgrounds or community groups. Then, we wanted to know why we had major issues in many areas. We need to front load services and resources and then the changes we are going to recommend will all come together like Ms Quigley said.

I appreciate the Chair's indulgence. I thank the witnesses. It has been very enlightening.

On some level, there is probably agreement across the board in the sense that what we are doing at the minute is not working in any way, shape or form. I am sure many people would agree with me. Sometimes, there is an element of nonsense when we are in here, particularly when we are talking about the drug situation.

I recall that RTÉ did a show - it may have been "Prime Time", but I cannot remember - about drug dealing in some open space in Ballymun. Everyone got very worked up about it and asked why the Garda was not doing this, that and the other. I said that this was hardly the only place in Ballymun where somebody was selling drugs. An issue I used to deal with as a county councillor was permeability or the idea that everyone should be able to walk wherever they could. However, the problem was that it created open spaces that were actually suited to antisocial and criminal activity. Anyway, everyone gets up and makes speeches on it and asks where the gardaí are and says this is not good enough. There is a pretence of an argument of being tough on crime, but you are actually not because you are not talking about anything else other than to keep policing with the same laws and keep doing the same things and eventually, we will deal with this issue. That is the real annoying scenario around it.

Ms Quigley spoke about the idea of having that holistic conversation, but that holistic conversation is not much good without the resources behind it. The representatives from the Irish Prison Service spoke about all the issues that have landed on them and all the mistakes that are made long before a prisoner ever gets there. We know the supports are there. We know anyone can fall into criminality and anyone can fall into a certain set of circumstances, yet it is more likely to happen if a person lives in a particular postcode and is surrounded by more of this. We also know there are people in very specific families where it is a hell of a lot more likely that it is going to happen. We leave people in these circumstances. That is why as much as we need the gardaí and all the supports that are required to deal with the organised crime part of it, we also have this chaotic aspect where vulnerable people are used. They are sometimes more of an issue to their neighbours and everyone else than the major drug dealers who generally do not annoy their neighbours and maintain some element of decorum. Some do; some of them might put it in people's faces and make sure everybody knows. That is a different kettle of fish, however. We do not have the supports to deal with these chaotic people. The council does not have the tools to deal with it. Tusla does not have the resources. I sometimes have particular issues around decisions that are not taken in time, and then we just leave kids in these sorts of scenarios. I get that the resources that are required are not there. Even the Garda does not have the resources. We are sometimes talking about mounting operations on what are really petty criminals. Again, we are talking about people who get put away for three or four months. Sometimes, that is a reprieve for their neighbours. I am not saying it is workable or any way useful. In all these circumstances, we are dealing with people who are snorting and eating tablets and doing all the rest of it. We probably expend a huge amount of time trying to access all these agencies that do not have the tools to deal with it. None of it works in any way, shape or form.

What I am saying is probably similar enough to what was said last week to the Irish College of General Practitioners, ICPG, and Irish Pharmacy Union and to what Deputy Gould said; it is a case that if we do not front load and do not have a framework, we can make all the changes we want but it will not achieve anything. It will not achieve what it needs to. Decriminalisation works if we still deal with all those other factors that are out there. Like I said earlier, it is that idea that in some cases, we have to tackle poverty and criminality and we have to be able to deal with these chaotic sets of circumstances. We need to make sure people do not fall into it in the first place, but that is not always possible. If we are coming late to the game, we have to be able to use services to address those people and their needs, but also the neighbours and communities they are detrimentally impacting. In some sets of circumstances, the neighbours do not care once those people are not there.

There will always be a bit of personal responsibility at some point, no matter what. The person must make certain decisions and all the rest of it, and must be facilitated. At the minute, anybody who has tried to get addiction supports and so on is literally running around and trying to keep an engine going with baling twine. There are a number of people who will just say if they end up in Cloverhill Prison or wherever at least they will have an opportunity to get resources. I remember Eddie Mullins saying that in those cases it was actually no good because the person would need to be at least on a year-long stint. I am not proposing that we put everyone into that set of circumstances.

On some level this is just a brain dump on my part but that is because there is a general level of agreement. These are chaotic people and one could be dealing with the granny and the grand kids as well. The person will end up going to jail for shoplifting, for example, but he or she will have done that a ridiculous amount of times. One can Google this. It is just ongoing chaos. None of it is working in any way, shape or form and it is having a detrimental impact. At this stage I am probably having a detrimental impact on all your ears.

The clock has well gone. Soliloquys. There is general agreement that there is some commendable stuff being done in the prison services. We need to remove some of the people from there so they do not actually get there in the first place. We have to put in those supports within communities and so on. Then we need to make sure we address it in all the places we can. As Deputy Gould has said, there are people who should be in prison. I could give the witnesses a list now and I would be happy enough if they could put them away, if we could bypass the whole justice system but there may be issues in relation to that.

I will just pick up on the points about the impact we can have on the ground in local communities. That can be really challenging. One of the key things we have learned from our long history - basically we are old - is that in the earlier days within communities we did, in a sense, turn on each other and we have learned from that. It is 100% that when we talk about community now it includes people who are using drugs and it includes their families. It is the whole community together. There are challenges in that but it is absolutely essential. We realised that if communities are turning on each other and blaming each other for this situation then the issues such as those we are talking about here end up not getting addressed because it is easier to frame it by saying there are bad people doing bad things and it is all their fault. It is, therefore, crucial to us now. I am sure the committee will hear from UISCE, the organisation that represents people who use drugs. Members will also be familiar with FASN in Dundalk. The national family addiction support network steering group organised an amazing conference last week with more than 300 people and families who are involved in all of these issues. There is a massive resource within our communities and we are 100% on the same page that it must be all of us working together.

Going back to the investment question, the community development piece that supports us in doing that also needs investment. We have a major challenge too in the need to be sure we can include the new communities that are coming to live with us, including the ethnic minorities. We know from what has happened in other countries that it is part of the challenge to make sure they have a voice. The experience from their communities is part of what we are aware of and part of what we are looking at. It can be challenging but it is about that unity across the community and being supported. If we do not put support into organisations like these networks that are trying to be positive and trying to focus where the real source of the issues is then we are forever going to end up blaming each other. We will end up with a situation like the one we have been talking about here.

I do not have the figures for Mountjoy at the moment but from my experience, having spent most of my career in Mountjoy, I have seen broken people coming in though addiction, homelessness and violence associated with the outside. We interview them on committal and we do a risk assessment to see where we can locate them. We introduce them to the likes of education and training programmes if they are serving a long enough sentence. The smaller the sentence the less likely it is the prisoner will get involved and the less likely we can make meaningful change to the person. When they come in we offer education, gym, exercise, psychology, psychiatry, work training programmes in the kitchen, laundry and bakery and all these kinds of skills. When they are eventually released they are getting out to a standard. Their health needs are looked after through our healthcare, education and the gymnasium. We work with training officers that look after them and maybe put them on a training programme. Eventually when they are released back into society I suppose they face the same social, economic and housing challenges again. Some will lapse again into drug seeking and drug use and then inevitably end up back with us in prison.

With regard to the composition of those who go into the prison system the figures are quite shocking that 70% to 80% of people have addiction issues. It is incredible. The main addiction issues are drugs, alcohol and prescribed drugs. We can see a spiral happening and this is extremely worrying. I am sure there are a lot of people in prison who should not be in prison. It is sad that some people have to go to prison to get help.

The citizens' assembly recommendations proposed a different model to what we have now. I would argue that the model of the last six decades has been failure in how we look at drug use in Ireland by criminalising people and sending people to prison. I just do not believe it works.

Going into crystal ball territory, if we had a system of decriminalisation where we do not criminalise the person, and I would go further to have a system of regulation of some drugs, in Mr. Treacy's opinion what kind of impact would this have on those who go into prison in terms of sales, supply and addiction issues?

Addiction, drugs and contraband is a very complex issue. One could say that if there were no drugs there would be no people in prison but it is a difficult one for me to answer with "One size fits all", because it certainly does not. Crime and the cartels of people who organise the importation of drugs into our country and our prisons are very sophisticated and well financed. It is no different in prison as well. One of the Cathaoirleach's colleagues touched upon it. The person who is orchestrating this is normally the polite person who does not get involved and does not have any disciplinary reports.

Unfortunately, it is when the person cannot afford drugs that the knock comes to the family's door or it ends up in violence in the community and in prison. It is a very complex issue. One size does not fit all when it comes to that issue.

We could think about it a bit differently and ask how it would be if people were getting the treatment they need for drug addiction in the community. It is not just about people being committed to prison for drug offences. Of the 424 people in custody today, there are only five in on section 3 offences – for simple possession.

Part of the drug-seeking behaviour is driving public order offences and theft-related offences, so there is a broader category of people. If we were to look at a situation where people got better treatment services for the addiction it might solve all of those issues. The majority of people who are in custody are in for possession charges. A significant number are in for possession of in excess of the value of €13,000. A lot of the people who are in for drug offences are in for drug dealing, but much of the addiction is driving offences other than drugs offences. It is driving all of those other multiplicity of issues. The people who have been sent to prison for theft, public order-related offences and shoplifting are the ones who are getting short-term sentences of three months, six months and nine months. They are living a chaotic life on the outside because it is being fuelled by their addiction. If we can stop that chaotic life on the outside, then we would certainly address a lot of that offending behaviour.

I have one final question, which I know is probably difficult to answer. There is a zero-tolerance policy in prisons in Ireland for contraband, especially illicit drugs. Stopping illicit drugs from coming into prisons is next to impossible. Is there any tolerance for certain illicit drugs? I know there is not.

Absolutely not for drug-taking within the prison environment, and for good reason. I have described some of the consequences for people going on protection and for their families in the community, but it also fuels fighting and assaults among prisoners. It absolutely has a detrimental effect within the service. It increases safety concerns for our staff. There is an absolutely zero-tolerance approach to drug taking and drug possession because it destabilises the community and what we want as a community where everybody can take the opportunity their sentences give them. We also want a safe community where those people in our care and, equally and more importantly our staff, are safe. Drug taking and drug-seeking behaviour and all of the attendant issues that go with them destabilise and make our prisons more unsafe.

My final question is for Ms Quigley. The CityWide project has been going for the past 29 years and it has seen a lot of changes. Public opinion has changed a lot on this issue. Communities, including where I live, have evolved in terms of how we deal with people with dependency issues. Some of it has been quite progressive while more of it has been regressive in terms of overall funding. In her opinion, where has the progress been made in the past 30 years and where have things gone backwards in how we approach the issue overall? This is a very complex issue that we all want to advance in a progressive way.

The progress is that we have a lot more understanding. When we started, we had no idea. We were ignorant. We knew nothing about drugs. We started off believing we were going to get rid of drugs and not have them any more. Now, we are very clearly aware that that is never going to happen – that every society has them. Throughout history, people have used drugs. There have been a lot of successes on the ground and across all services and sectors.

There is a huge amount of amazing work being done and that must be recognised. We have a lot of models such as the community drug projects, for example, that we are familiar with. It is a fantastic model of how we can deliver integrated care if they are sufficiently resourced.

We have a lot of knowledge and understanding of the kind of interventions and supports that can help but we have gone so far backwards in terms of recognising the need to address the underlying causes. We are hopeful with this committee and the recommendations of the citizens' assembly. These kind of inconsistencies are due to the Government's policy being a health-led and trauma-informed approach. It is about health and recognising trauma but then the Government thinks that people should still be considered a criminal for using drugs. There is no logic to that. We are hopeful that the mindset has moved on but we will have to wait and see. That will be down to the committee.

There is a broader challenge that we have all the time. It is important to say that so many people have done a huge amount of work. Something happens every time we feel we are making progress. It may not be anything to do with us, but the public narrative is led by all of the stuff around the drugs trade. It is about gangs, families and massive seizures. All of that stuff is more dominant. That is the reality. People are interested in that and they want to hear about it. "Love/Hate" was the most popular programme on TV and we all watched "The Godfather" films. People are attracted to the narrative about all the bad people involved. That is a huge challenge, because it is how it is framed. For all the progress we make, it is still framed as bad people doing bad things. There is still a strong element of a lot of people among the general public seeing it that way. That means the stigma has not really shifted. As an issue, there is a stigma around it. Straight away, that is just where it belongs.

I thank Ms Quigley. I thank members and all the staff for their work today.

I thank all the witnesses for their very insightful contributions on this very important issue. I also thank them for abiding by our sometimes archaic rules.

The next meeting is on 3 October.