We have apologies from Deputies Colm Burke and Devine. I am delighted to open the 19th public meeting of the joint committee and the third in our module on legal issues. Today we will explore civil society perspectives on legal, policy and operational responses to drug use. I welcome our witnesses. From UISCE drug support, Mr. Andy O'Hara is joined by Ms Annmarie Dunphy, advocacy worker, and Ms Suzanne Kahn, peer worker. From Family Addiction Recovery Ireland, FARI, Mr. Mick Mason is joined by Ms Aileen Malone, and from Youth RISE, Ms Ruby Rose Lawlor is joining us online.

Before we begin, I must read out a note on privilege. I remind witnesses and members of the long-standing parliamentary practice that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity by name or in such a way as to make him or her identifiable or otherwise engage in speech that might be regarded as damaging to the good name of the person or entity. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative that they comply with any such direction.

I also remind members of the constitutional requirement that, in order to participate in public meetings, members must be physically present within the confines of the Leinster House complex. Members of the committee attending remotely must do so from within the precincts of Leinster House. This is due to the constitutional requirement that, in order to participate in public meetings, members must be physically present within the confines of the place where Parliament has chosen to sit. In this regard, I ask any members participating via Microsoft Teams to make their place known before they speak.

As agreed, witnesses will each have five minutes to deliver their opening statements to allow plenty of time for questions and answers. If necessary, further and more detailed information can be sent to the clerk to the committee for distribution to members. Members will be going in and out. There is a big Bill being discussed in the Seanad, so I ask the witnesses not to read anything more into it.

I invite Mr. O'Hara to deliver his opening statement on behalf of UISCE.

I thank the Cathaoirleach. As drug policy currently stands in Ireland, there is a long history of significant gaps between policy and practice. These gaps have had real consequences for the well-being of people who use drugs.

While Ireland has taken important steps in recognising substance use as a public health issue, progress in translating policy commitments into legislative and practical action has been slow and inconsistent.

In other areas of public health, we have seen how quickly legislation can move when there is political will. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the State implemented rapid legislative and policy changes to support a co-ordinated public health response. While substance use is not a viral pandemic, Ireland continues to experience among the highest rates of drug-related deaths in Europe. This represents a serious and ongoing public health crisis that should be met with the same urgency and commitment. Instead, we continue to see significant delays between evidence, policy commitments and implementation. A clear example is the pilot medically supervised injecting facility, which faced legislative and legal barriers from 2017 until 2024. During that time, overdose deaths continued to rise and people who used drugs remained subject to criminalisation, despite clear evidence that criminalisation is ineffective and can worsen health outcomes.

Ireland has committed to protecting equality and human rights through legislation such as the Irish Human Rights and Equality Act 2014. The public sector duty requires public bodies to assess and address the equality and human rights impacts of their policies and services. However, there is limited evidence that this duty has been systematically applied within substance use policy.

It is also important to recognise that many of the harms associated with drug use are not caused by substances alone. Research consistently shows that structural factors such as poverty, homelessness, stigma, criminalisation and barriers to healthcare are major drivers of drug-related harm. Despite a strong and growing evidence base, these structural drivers have not been adequately addressed in Irish drug policy. In some cases, policies themselves can produce or intensify harm. This is increasingly described internationally as policy harm, when laws, systems or institutional practices create additional risks for people who use drugs. Recognising policy harm is essential if legislation is to genuinely support health, dignity and human rights.

Many of the interventions we advocate for are evidence-based and have been successfully implemented in other jurisdictions. We urge legislative action in several key areas: decriminalisation of possession of substances for personal use; legislation to expand low-barrier, high-quality treatment services, including enabling nurse-prescribing of methadone and buprenorphine-containing medications to improve treatment access and reduce waiting lists; and strengthening implementation of the public sector equality and human rights duty within substance use policy. We also recommend the establishment of an independent inspectorate to monitor service quality and protect the human rights of people who use drugs within substance use services; the expansion of the SIFs into a supervised consumption space, and their expansion into other necessary areas; and legislative support for drug checking services, accompanied by appropriate policing practices to ensure people can safely access them. In addition, naloxone should be made available without a prescription.

When developing policy, it is vital that the voices and experiences of people who use drugs are meaningfully included. Community development organisations, such as UISCE, play an important role in supporting this participation. Through our peer partnership for change framework, we outline practical ways to move beyond tokenistic consultation towards genuine partnership in policy development and implementation. By fully partnering with people who use drugs, we can develop timely and impactful polices that meet the needs of those most impacted. To do this, we need a policy framework that protects and funds independent networks and participatory structures grounded in social justice.

Ultimately, effective drug policy must do more than respond to harm. It must ensure that the laws and systems we create do not themselves produce harm. Recognising and addressing policy harm is, therefore, essential if Ireland is to move towards a truly evidence-based approach that protects health, dignity and human rights. I will finish with a quote from a published paper from the Global Commission on Drug Policy. It states that the overwhelming majority of drug-related deaths are preventable. They are largely caused by the failures of governments to adopt and implement policies that prioritise public health and human rights, including the persistent stigma and discrimination that pushes people to the margins of society. The evidence is clear. The question is whether we will listen.

Thank you. I call Mr. Mason to give his opening statement on behalf of FARI.

Ms Malone and I welcome this opportunity to contribute to the debate. I will start with the impact on the family of the criminalisation of people who use drugs. FARI calls for the decriminalisation of the person in relation to the possession of all substances for personal use. In line with the recommendations of the citizens’ assembly, the goal of drugs policy should be to reduce harm and eliminate stigma, which are both, in large part, caused and exacerbated by the criminalisation of people who use drugs. In our report, Trauma in the Community, 36% of family members reported feeling stigma and shame due to their association with a person who uses drugs. Families experience ongoing stigma, real impacts on children and financial hardships that create high levels of poverty and deprivation. The social and emotional cost of the criminalisation of those who use drugs adds another level of trauma for a family already under pressure because of a loved one’s harmful drug use.

Families know the impact of having a family member in prison because of drug use. These adverse impacts are described in a report commissioned by the Irish Penal Reform Trust, Paying the Price: The Cost and Impact of Imprisonment on Families in Ireland. It states:

Parental imprisonment has profound emotional, social, and developmental consequences for children and families, many of which extend beyond the period of imprisonment. Research consistently identifies parental imprisonment as a major contributor to economic hardship, social exclusion, and instability in family life.

Partners, children and kinship carers have increased anxiety, depression and behavioural challenges. The trauma associated with imprisonment can leave lasting psychological effects. The stigma of partner, child or parental imprisonment isolates family members and intensifies their distress. The loss of another income causes economic hardship and increases the strain on the partner or other kinship carers.

Families are impacted very heavily by the occurrence of drug-related psychosis in a loved one. Research shows that some issues with psychosis and mental health difficulties are caused by cannabis. Ireland’s unregulated supply, controlled by the criminal networks, exacerbates this growing problem.

In FARI, we believe that the criminalisation of drug use and people who use drugs is not an effective strategy. It does not deter the use of drugs. The fact is that nearly 70% of convictions for drug offences in Ireland are for possession of drugs for personal use. Between 1996 and 2020, there were more than 250,000 recorded crimes for possession of drugs for personal use. There is a significant cost to the State due to the policing, legal aid, probation, DPP and court resources that could be better invested in health and social services. We need a more effective way to support people who use drugs, their families and our communities. Demonising and criminalising individuals who use drugs, as we have, does not work. If we continue to do this, we are causing people who use drugs and their families additional harm, as well as reducing the effectiveness of any initiatives or services we put in place. We cannot respond effectively to improving health, treatment, social and recovery options while we continue to impose punitive criminal responses. Families know that due to the absence of adequate mental health support and services in our communities, drug use often becomes a way of self-medicating to cope with mental health issues and the impact of trauma.

Families know that drug convictions have a potential negative impact on a person’s whole life and across many aspects of their lives, such as employment, accessing training or education, being able to travel or securing housing. We believe it makes no sense that services are working to support people to make progress in their lives while, at the same time, putting up barriers to their progress by criminalising them.

FARI welcomed the opportunity to participate in the citizens’ assembly, where a family member told their story of years of contact with the criminal justice system because of one family member’s drug use. They told of the traumatic impact of seeing their family member incarcerated time and again for multiple minor offences. The opportunities missed to diagnose their son’s mental health issues in school and in the prison system led to years of lost family life.

We believe the solution to substance-related harm needs an ambitious and radical commitment to making families the centre of future drugs strategy and policy. When we focus on families, we can identify the needs and responses required for all the family members, including the people who use substances, siblings, children, partners and carers. We need to end the criminalisation of drug users and put our resources into improved drug, alcohol and community services that will have better outcomes for people who use these services, their families and the community.

Thank you. I call Ms Lawlor to deliver her statement on behalf of Youth RISE.

I thank the committee for the opportunity to present. I am the executive director of Youth RISE, an international network of young people who use drugs and those who are otherwise affected by drug policies. We advocate for evidence-based, rights-centred approaches that prioritise health and well-being while addressing the structural conditions that shape vulnerability. We work globally, including within the UN processes such as the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, as well as at regional and national levels, including previous engagement with this committee.

It is with this background that I speak to the committee about what it means to protect young people through a comprehensive approach to prevention. If our goal is to protect young people, it is important to recognise that current approaches are not fully achieving that objective. Ireland continues to experience high levels of drug-related harm, including rising overdose risks linked to an increasingly toxic and unpredictable drug supply.

The citizens' assembly has already provided a strong and comprehensive roadmap. I will focus on how these recommendations translate into effective protection in practice.

For example, recommendation 17 refers to a health-led approach to drug use and possession. Current criminalisation-based responses can contribute to harm rather than preventing it, as the previous speakers have just outlined. Those responses expose young people to criminal records, sanctions and contact with the criminal justice system, while also creating barriers to accessing education, healthcare and other essential support, not to mention facilitating stigma. These impacts can have long-term consequences for young people's development and life opportunities.

Ireland's Garda youth diversion scheme provides useful insight into the benefits of diverting young people away from the criminal justice system, with most participants not going on to reoffend. This demonstrates the value of supportive approaches; however, diversion alone does not address the broader structural drivers of harm.

In this context, a fully health-led approach would benefit from the removal of criminal penalties for possession for personal use, accompanied by strengthened health and social responses. International evidence from the 39 countries that have adopted some form of decriminalisation indicates that this does not lead to long-term increased drug use, while it does improve health and social outcomes. This approach is also increasingly supported by international human rights bodies, including the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health. Consideration should also be given to addressing the long-term impacts of criminalisation, including pathways to expungement of past convictions.

Recommendations 2 and 4 highlight the importance of a whole-of-government and socioeconomic approach. Drug-related harm does not occur in isolation; it is closely linked to poverty, inequality and access to services. The committee has already recognised the relationship between deprivation and drug-related harm.

This points to the importance of applying a "do no harm" principle across all relevant policy areas. Prevention in this context can be understood not only as preventing or delaying onset of drug use but as preventing harm by ensuring access to healthcare, harm reduction, housing, education and employment.

To support this, we recommend consideration of full-spectrum harm reduction as a comprehensive prevention approach. This is a person-centred and intersectional model that recognises the broader social and structural factors shaping health and well-being. In practice, this approach combines healthcare with mental health support, legal assistance, education and social protection. It also emphasises community- and peer-led responses, ensuring that young people are meaningfully involved in the design and delivery of services.

From this perspective, prevention and harm reduction are complementary rather than separate. Interventions such as overdose prevention and drug checking can be understood as essential components of a comprehensive prevention system.

We are also seeing similar integrated approaches emerge internationally. For example, in Brazil, prevention strategies increasingly bring together health, education and social protection systems, rather than relying solely on models based on deterrence of drug use. Overall, this suggests that effective prevention requires addressing the broader conditions that shape harm, rather than focusing solely on substance use itself.

Recommendation 28 calls for a comprehensive, age-appropriate prevention strategy. Current approaches are often abstinence-based and do not reflect the realities young people face. A more effective approach would complement existing prevention efforts with harm reduction. This includes providing honest, evidence-based and interactive education that supports young people to understand risks, respond to emergencies and make informed decisions, whether that involves abstaining, reducing use or adopting safer practices. Such approaches can include practical components such as overdose response and naloxone and can extend beyond school settings into communities, nightlife environments and online spaces. Engaging parents, educators and communities is also an important part of building a supportive prevention environment. Evidence from multiple contexts shows that harm reduction-based education improves knowledge, risk awareness and safety without increasing drug use.

Recommendations 10 and 33 emphasise the importance of participation and evidence. Policies are more effective when they are informed by people who use drugs, including young people who use drugs, and when they are supported by strong data systems. At present, there are still barriers to meaningful participation of young people who use drugs, including stigma, limited youth-focused services and resource constraints. This can result in policies that do not fully reflect the needs and realities of those most affected. Strengthening mechanisms for meaningful participation, particularly through peer-led approaches, can improve both the relevance and effectiveness of responses. At the same time, strengthening data collection and research systems is essential to better understand trends, map services and inform decision-making.

Finally, through our work with the Global Commission on Drug Policy and the Global Campus of Human Rights, we are developing a policy brief grounded in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, based on consultations with children and young people globally. This will provide further evidence in support of governments in aligning their drug policies with children's rights.

Ireland is facing significant and evolving drug-related challenges, including an increasingly complex and risky drug market. The citizens' assembly has provided a strong foundation for responding to these challenges. The evidence base is clear and there is a growing body of international experience to draw from. The key consideration now is how these recommendations can be implemented in a way that most effectively protects the health, well-being and rights of young people.

Thank you, Ms Lawlor. We now move to our members.

I thank the witnesses for coming in and for their briefing at Buswells, which was informative as always.

I will start with Mr. O'Hara, if he does not mind. There are some really strong words in his opening statement. They are really important as well. He mentions making sure we do not end up having a tokenistic consultation and that the obvious alternative to that would be genuine partnership. As the consultation is ongoing, I would like him to tell us what genuine partnership looks like and what kind of engagement he would like to see following the consultation process.

Genuine partnership is about sharing power. Particularly with people who use drugs, there is a lot of talk about lived and living experience, but it is still vital that we actually mean it. I think a lot of our experience, to be brutally honest, is that people are being co-opted into and invited into spaces as long as they say what the current narrative is. I just have to say how potentially harmful that is. It is about community development. UISCE is independent. The reason UISCE was set up was that people who used drugs did not have a voice within structures and services and that when they did it was extremely harmful. I will always refer back to the Ryan report in 2009, which was very explicit on the fact that people who were in institutions and in care were telling people but the institutions just sought to protect themselves. There is clear evidence internationally as to why sometimes we need independent organisations. Then the process they have on how they try to achieve social change is critical. We have to fund and prioritise the protection of those spaces and then we have to listen to them when they have a voice. We are very active. We have thousands of engagements a year. We do advocacy cases. Everything in the organisation is peer-led first of all but then there are advocacy cases. People come to us and tell us what is going on in all the systems. Then we work with them to do groups, campaigns and various pieces to make sure they have a voice. When someone is responsible for your accommodation, your medication, your kids, the chances of you pushing back and having a voice within that is zero or nigh on impossible. Someone said to me recently, "For all my life, we have been marginalised, excluded and punished for having a voice. Then, finally, we set up a national organisation, get together and have a voice, and then, as soon as we do that, we get excluded or shut down." I just cannot overstate the power in sharing power and meaning it and what happens when we do not.

Right now we are struggling. We are not struggling to do the work, we are not struggling to capture the voices and we are not struggling to get people into civil society or into civil spaces. We are struggling for people to be heard. We are struggling for this to translate into legislative change. I can go through loads of different bits of research and toolkits. We are out the ying-yang with submissions and I do not know if any of it has been listened to. I will tell the committee where it was listened to, actually: at the citizens' assembly. A lot of the stuff we said was in the citizens' assembly, so it very much reflected that, but we are not seeing it in the current consultation or in the current national drugs strategy. I think that is a reflection of the fact that we have excluded the very people who have the analysis that is explicitly required.

Mr. O'Hara mentions the citizens' assembly. We know there is a direct link between poverty and the marginalised communities and the people who are most affected by drug use and its effects.

Is that one of the things that would be of concern to Mr. Mason with regard to the new strategy and aligning with the citizens' assembly findings?

From a family point of view, it has to be all-encompassing. Everybody has to be involved. That means the people who use drugs, the community projects and the families. Families are a significant part of it. Families are living it day in and day out. They are there 24-7, so they are the first line of support for the majority of people. After that, all the other services come in. They must be there at the very beginning to design it, be part of building the policy and be able to criticise the policy if they do not agree with it. We have to be able to do that. We have to be able to say "this is working for families" or "this is not working for families". We have to be allowed to do that. If we are not allowed to do that, we will be excluded all the time because we speak up and a significant part of the problem is being completely ignored. It is important for families to be there and to be heard. It is also important that it is acted upon in order that families have a huge say. They are the first line of defence. They are the ones dealing with it 24-7.

What we are seeing in this so-called national drugs strategy is a blatant and barely concealed attempt to disarm powerful self-advocacy by pioneering radical organisations like UISCE, which are completely peer led and peer run and have no hierarchy. It is actual self-advocacy by people who have been sleeping on the streets. Some are still sleeping on the streets and using drugs. This is an attempt to disarm that. We are unique but we should not be. This is the sort of advocacy that will create change in the lifetimes of these people, who are living and dying on the street. What we are seeing is an attempt to disarm us via tokenism. Tokenism is not just neutral or ineffective; it causes harm. One thing we see in the national drugs strategy is a significant focus on recovery at the expense of the humanity of people who use drugs. It is a case of "We will pull you into the lifeboat if you can tick all these boxes and do everything that we say." Humanity is unconditional. It does not rely on us meeting all of your requirements. It is blatant tokenism and we are through with it. We have been speaking up for years. There is no excuse for this level of ignorance and ignoring recommendations and self-advocacy by the people who are actually suffering and dying on our streets.

That speaks to policy harm, which we might get to.

I thank everyone for their contributions. I will leave the questions open to whoever wants to come in on them. What Ms Kahn said about the tokenism and the paternalism is so important. This is the idea that somebody knows better than the people who are living the reality, and having an analysis. That is what surprises people. It is not this charitable thing of "We just need to have a voice", and that means you are at the table and just have a voice. It does not matter what you are saying, because those involved will not take it on board, will not implement it and will not introduce the solutions being offered. There is a sense of "Aren't you just comfortable that we're saying that you're at the table and you're going to have a voice and that's it", but that voice has no power or impact. That is the difference. I do not think people understand the real obsession with obtaining power when it comes to this issue and to ignoring the analysis. We only have to look back to the 1800s, the Poor Law Act, industrial schools and the institutionalisation of people. Now, all of a sudden, we have the phrase "Everyone uses drugs". It is a case of let us dismantle everything and share it out equally because everyone uses drugs. That ignores centuries of harm to communities.

What I want to throw out here is the piece around harm. We keep referring to drug-related harm. I use that term as well. We need to flip it back because it is policy harm and has historically been policy harm. Could the witnesses comment on the class analysis of drugs and why it is important because of where harm has accumulated and is concentrated and where, historically, policy has systemically destroyed whole populations?

The Senator said it. Look at the evidence. Some people will remember when heroin hit in the 1980s. It was concentrated in certain communities. Here we are, 30 or 40 years later, and if we look at the statistics, we can see that they have all got worse. More people are dying, there is more violence and more people are going to prison and into care. The majority of this is concentrated in certain areas. This is expanding because housing, the cost-of-living crisis and inequality are spreading. As a result, there are people who traditionally might not have been in that group who are getting pulled into it, but it involves the same stuff. When we look at certain communities, they are moving away from suggesting that this is about anything but class and power. It is about power. The Rabbitte report came out 30 years ago. That report was good, because for the first time that the State said "Do you know what? We didn't listen and because we did not listen, harm was caused to your communities." The lack of action and the lack of listening lead us to a point where we have a significant number of preventable harm and deaths. That is what this is. It is not the result of drug use. People are taking drugs to survive. People are taking drugs to self-medicate. People are taking drugs to live.

What we are doing is punishing people for experiencing trauma and poverty. That goes to the nub of the decriminalisation concept. People think decriminalisation is just about someone getting a job - and it is about that - but criminalising people is exposing them to harm. There is a reason why people use drugs are viewed vastly differently to people who are dependent on alcohol or gambling and there is a reason why the harms are far worse. It is because criminalising people. It is a case of "You are wrong. There's something wrong with you. It's an individual problem and the only thing we can offer you as a State is a way for us to fix you instead of recognising that what we need is for you guys to tell us how to fix the system."

I am a woman with two children from a rural area who has used drugs in the past. There are no services in rural areas. You are on a HSE waiting list for months on end trying to access services. I was clean for months before I even accessed treatment. I had never heard of UISCE. I volunteered with UISCE, went on to work as a peer support worker and am now an advocacy worker. We get daily cases of people who are being mistreated and whose human rights are not being respected, be it in the context of housing, Tusla or clinics.

The way people are treated for using drugs is disgraceful. At an event here last week, I said that if this was an animal on the street getting treated like that, the ISPCA would be called straight away. Because you are a person who uses drugs, however, you are looked down upon. That is harmful. People are dying daily as a result of drug use. People are being criminalised and sent to prison. Why are the same people going in and out of prison? Why is the rehabilitation not there for them? People are coming out of prison and have nowhere to go. They are homeless and back on the streets. What choices have they got? They do not have any. That has a ripple effect on families and on children who are growing up. I was completely written off until my children were 18. I fought tooth and nail to get my children back, and I have them back. The expectation is not the reality. There is no way people can get themselves sorted in two weeks. That is not possible. Those involved are then putting this recovery focus into the national drugs strategy. Recovery is great, but harm reduction should be the core pillar of it because without harm reduction, who is going to get recovery?

It is obviously all part of one. When we say that drug users are looked down upon, I do not know if the witnesses would agree but I think it relates to the type of drug user. It is not every drug user, because people in the halls of power, banks and the police force are supposedly using cocaine and other types of drugs but are not treated with the same contempt as those from other drug-using cohorts.

It is really great to hear fellow panellists agree with everything that has been shared. Senator Ruane's question is fantastic.

To zoom us out a little bit to the UN level, in 2009, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, UNODC, highlighted several unintended consequences of drug control, including policy displacement away from public health towards law enforcement. Last year's World Drug Report acknowledged that the policy environment is one influencing factor that can either mitigate or exacerbate drug-related harm. Looking at it from that perspective, the policies that are supposed to be supporting people are causing the harm themselves. As Senator Ruane said, more people are using drugs. Young people are not being prevented from using drugs. Doubling down on the same approaches is not working, and as was said, recovery means something different to each person. It does not always mean stopping the use of drugs. It can mean accessing healthcare services or being able to get past the waiting list stage of housing. It should not be dependent on whether the person uses drugs. That is an arbitrary indicator, and we need to shift our focus away from indicators on whether people are using drugs and put it on whether people are able to access the full benefits that should be available to them for them to have their socio-economic rights fulfilled within their societies.

I will come in on that, because what was said is really important. As Ms Dunphy emphasised as well, there are many layers to this. The word used was intersectionality, and one of the layers of what makes institutional abuse is lying by omission. It ignores the chronic interconnectedness. For example, I have been involved in sex work most of my life to fund my habit or just survive. There is a lot of interconnectedness between poverty, sex work, generational trauma and criminalisation, and there are layers to criminalisation as well. For example, the main story I came here to tell today, and I will tell it really quickly, is when I was first living in Dublin, I lived with five men who were dealing drugs. I was the only female sex worker in the gaff. It was up by the top of Prussia Street. I was gang raped by all five men in the house. The friend I told persuaded me to go to the cops, which I did not want to do. I ended up being charged with wasting police time, because as soon as I said I was a working girl, they decided I had been charging these guys for sex, one of them had not paid me, or had underpaid me, and I was trying to get revenge by taking them to court or whatever. Aside from criminalising people for doing stuff they need to do to survive, it is criminalising them for being victims. I bring this up because, obviously, many of the politicians who are responsible for this national drug strategy will probably hear that and say it is disgusting and terrible, but they were all there in that room, metaphorically speaking, because they are the ones who form societal attitudes. Politicians are at the top of this pyramid of power, and they need to be challenging the biases that let this stuff happen and let the police treat working girls that way. They need to be challenging these biases and deconstructing them, not indulging them.

The criminal injustice system is responsible for so much of this, and we need to be seeing that reflected in a national drug strategy that turns all of this on its head and we are not. It is the same shit over and over again. It is deconstructing nothing. We are looking at whole communities of people who never had a chance, and we have been spoon-feeding the Government what we need. The problem is not our voices, we are well able to advocate for ourselves. The problem is their ears.

I agree. Thank you.

I will let Deputy Sherlock in but everybody will have a chance to speak, I promise.

I am happy to let Mr. Mason commence and then I will ask my questions.

I have one quick point. When we talk about marginalisation, discrimination and poverty, what we see as a national family organisation is that the families at the lower level of the social economic spectrum or whatever the committee wants to call it - the most marginalised families - suffer the worst. We cannot ignore that point at all that those families who cannot afford or do not have health insurance or anything else, whether counselling or treatment for their family members or whatever, the ones at the very bottom of the pile, suffer the most. We see that time and again. It became quite clear during our conference held in 2024 that those families at the bottom in those marginalised communities suffer the most. It is all there in our report.

A heartfelt thank you to our representatives from UISCE, FARI and Youth RISE for being here today, and to Ms Kahn for sharing her story, which forces us all to sit up and reflect on what leadership we give to An Garda Síochána and the whole system. When people present in such a vulnerable situation, to be treated like that is appalling. I thank her for sharing that story today.

There is enormous frustration out there in that there was such a weight of expectation following on from the citizens' assembly that we would finally have some joined-up thinking with regard to addiction, harm reduction, families and a comprehensive drug strategy in this country. There is a lot of expectation arising from the work of this committee because there have been some brilliant sessions, and yet I look at a document which, on one hand, says yes, the criminal justice system is not designed to deal with personal drug issues, and then goes on and effectively reinforces the system we have.

I very much support and add my voice to the conversation that has just taken place between Senator Ruane and our witnesses and all that has been said. I am 100% supportive of that conversation because it is those families who have very little who ultimately do not ever get their chance to put their hands up and say "we are being stigmatised". They remain within that vicious cycle of shame and stigma. To those who find themselves in that vicious cycle, trying to find their way out, and Ms Dunphy talked about trying to look for that help but ultimately not being recognised, that is so wrong.

What would be useful in the time we have here today would be to understand what our witnesses' expectations would be from what the strategy is saying it wants to do. We are hearing for donkey's years about a health diversion scheme that An Garda Síochána was supposed to introduce many years ago and is only now getting around to. It would be useful to hear from Mr. O'Hara, because he has been around a while and had interactions with gardaí and seen how they have interacted with drug users. I would like to hear what his expectation is of what that health diversion scheme is going to look like.

My expectations are that it will probably reproduce some of the harm that we already have. That is not just from our experience but from the evidence. Looking at the citizens' assembly, we try and work as best we can with the Garda and have good relationships with its members, but we have to understand that gardaí come from a broader society where there is a very particular moral crusade against particular types of people who use particular types of drugs. When we look at the health diversion programme, what we know to be true on the ground and what we also know from evidence is, first, it is still criminalising people. It moves away from the citizens' assembly, which said we cannot be punishing people.

What will happen, and it will interesting to get the stats in a few years’ time, is that, in spite of all the evidence we have now, we will have two groups of people. One will be the people who are the most criminalised, who have been described here already, who are on heroin, who are smoking crack, who are going through a litany of abuses daily, and the drugs are actually keeping them alive, who already have a bad relationship with An Garda Síochána, who are already targeted by gardaí and gardaí already do not like. It will not be long before they get the one or two cautions - they could get them in a day. It will not work for them. There will be a suggestion that there was a health diversion programme for them, and if it does not work, they will be demonised. The other group is the loads of people we already have who take drugs recreationally. Some 90% of the profits from drugs in Europe are from recreational drug use. We have loads of people, whether we like it or not, who take drugs, and if we are hoping to shame them into stopping, I do not think we are going to be successful. What we will do is get a load of people who probably got caught with possession of a bit of weed, coke or ketamine, and they will be rammed into doing a load of sessions in some sort of health diversion programme. It will not work for people who are recreational users or people who are actually criminalised, so we will probably have to do an assessment on what really is the value for money here.

What it will do is give the illusion that we actually care and do not want to criminalise people.

It is simple in my view, in that what we have done is take is a moral crusade against people who use drugs. I can understand where it came from. There was a lot of fear in the 1980s with heroin and people dying. People were asking what they were going to do and feeling they just needed to get rid of the drugs, the dealers and all that lark instead of realising it was linked to class and power. We decided we were going to punish people, which we know never stops people taking drugs. Even after we realised how harmful it was, we continued anyway because, while we do not like to admit it, there was almost an assessment that, although we were aware of the harm it caused to one group over here, if it saved this other group of people over there, then fuck it. The thing is, it does not even save the other group of people. I know loads of people who do not take drugs and none of them is not taking drugs because they are scared of getting arrested by the Garda. The majority of people who take drugs for recreation will never come in contact with the Garda. However, if they do get arrested, their lives will be severely affected. What is the cost-benefit analysis here and what are we actually doing? I have serious reservations about not only how ineffective it would be, but how harmful it would be.

My concern is that it gives a pass to the recreational drug user who happens to have drugs on them on a particular night but not necessarily the people who we really need to be addressing and talking about here. I am really struck by FARI's submission, which talks about decriminalisation, but it will not solve the issues. However, the current policy of criminalisation is making things so much worse, going back to that stigma and shame piece.

I have one very practical question about naloxone. The Department says progress is being made in the distribution of naloxone. Mr. O'Hara referred to distribution without prescription. Can he talk about that in a little more?

We are one of the main organisations that partner with the HSE. Since the way we do training is peer led, we have access to hundreds of people every year with it. They are people nobody else can access. The reality is that, right now, it is a prescribed drug, sop people need a prescription. We have a standard operating procedure with the HSE and we can only give it out to those at risk of an overdose. However, there are family members, people we come across who work on outreach, people working in shops like security guards, etc. The crisis is so vast that there are loads of people who would want to carry that drug, but right now the legislation states that it can only be prescribed to people who are at risk of an overdose or service providers who are working in close proximity to those people. It would be the easiest win ever. In fairness to the HSE, it has been rolling this out and has done great work on this. In parts of America, they have it in vending machines. Librarians carry it. That is just where it is. It also helps us destigmatise drug use and people who are overdosing.

We do a lot of naloxone training all over Dublin. It is mad because there are some places we go into where the person could be using drugs for ten-plus or 15-plus years and they say they never heard about naloxone. These are people who are actively in use. If that was deregulated, how many lives would have been saved?

To the point on the Garda, I was watching a television programme the other night and they were talking to Garda inspectors. They actually said that people who used drugs ruined this city. The people who use drugs did not ruin this city. It is the policies that are in place that have harmed the city. It is just crazy. It is beyond me how narrow-minded people can be when it comes to it. To be quite honest, every parent should be scared for what is ahead if the national drug strategy does not change because it is going to harm people.

It really struck me when the Deputy asked what our expectations would be. I do not know if that was meant in a practical sense or an idealistic one, as in what we would like to happen or what we expect would happen. For years, we have been spoon-feeding people in positions of power who could do anything for us in terms of what we need. Why should we have any trust left? The Government should be embarrassed of itself. I hope it is. I am talking about sitting beside friends and watching them die while it took over an hour for an ambulance to get to us. These are not just cases where we can say they are tragic and where people - not the committee members specifically - can sit here, pull the right face and say whatever. In a lot of cases, these were young people who had loved ones, who had potential and talents and dreams, and I watched them die. I hope they haunt the people who could have done something to help them.

Nobody in this room but us has to go back to a life on the street and wake up to gardaí kicking the side of your tent multiple times during the night saying we cannot be there and we have to move on. Everyone has to be somewhere. They have no suggestions for what else we should do or where else we should be because we are trash to the Government.

This is my personal commitment while I am still alive to haunt the Government for the rest of my life until we see some sort of accountability, because we deserve it and they deserve it.

Everybody should have naloxone. If somebody starts taking drugs again, sometimes it is the family that notice first but they will be the last people to be told. So, they should have it in the house or in a handbag and be carrying it at all times. I totally agree with UISCE that everybody should have access and it should be available non-prescription. It is available as a nasal spray. It does not do any harm whatsoever if you are not in an opiate overdose. It should be available and everybody should have it, including bus drivers and the whole lot. There will be people going into overdose on buses.

The current situation does not make sense. We agree with Mr. O'Hara that the HSE has been trying to push it out there. It just needs to be legislated for and made available to everyone.

I will ask my questions now. The draft national drugs strategy does not explicitly make the connection between drug use at a level that is devastating people and communities and poverty. What does it mean for a national drugs strategy not to make this connection?

It means it will continue to cause harm. We said that about policy harm. "Unintended consequences" is written somewhere and we talked about it. It is intentional at this stage. That is the only thing we can take from this.

Does it feel intentional?

That is what I am saying. It is not the eighties any more. We are not wandering around in the dark.

This was the first national drugs strategy where groups like CityWide, UISCE and FARI were not in the steering group. It is also the first national drugs strategy that does not explicitly make a connection with poverty.

Among loads of other research, we did a living experience analysis of emergency accommodation. It was independent and done with people who were currently drug dependent and living in emergency accommodation. The stats were clear. Everybody had experienced poverty and trauma. Roughly 20% were Travellers, even though they are 0.5% of the population. A total of 27% had been in care and 24% had kids in care. A total of 27% had disabilities. All the marginalised groups were over-represented. We have this system whereby we have groups of people who are extremely marginalised and left with little or no opportunity and who take drugs to cope with the reality they are in, or sell drugs because of economic opportunity. When they navigate through the system, their needs get more complex the more often they go to prison, to emergency accommodation or to clinics. Every time they present at all of those services, they are reinforcing the negative stereotypes for people because people are continuously judging them and thinking there is something wrong with them. The whole system itself actually makes life-long victims of the systems. What we are really doing is creating systems of deprivation.

The witnesses might expand on that, as it relates to my next question. Last night, the Dóchas Centre prison was 153% over capacity. Twenty-nine women were sleeping on the floor. What does that do to a person?

What do you think?

I have spent a lot of time in institutions - more mental hospitals than prisons - so I can tell the committee that a lot of people dread mental hospitals, especially the Central Mental Hospital, CMH, more than they dread prison. It is something you never recover from. There is a cliché that physical scars fade faster than mental scars, but it goes back to what I said earlier and what my colleagues have been saying very eloquently, in that it is institutional abuse in all of its forms. There is collusion up to the highest levels of government. Like I said, I could not have been treated by those cops and criminalised just for existing and selling sex to survive if those attitudes were not the attitudes of people higher up in the Government.

If you think I have never been paid for my services by people in those sort of positions, think again, but that is neither here nor there. Essentially, for people who are institutionalised, it tends to be a lifelong condition. For example, people bounce in and out of care, then they become care-leavers. I have always caught myself thinking as an adult dealing with social workers and house managers in hospitals, I have come away from meetings feeling really patronised and badly treated. I have come away thinking, "I fucking hate adults," and then, "I am an adult now". Basically that is really a powerful thought for me, because you are treated like a child your whole life. You are treated as though you not only are powerless but you deserve no power. I think that forms how you interact with the systems. What we are dealing with is systemic abuse. Like I said, why should we have any trust left? People have no trust left. With that, you cannot build productive relationships even with people who are sincerely trying to help you. There are good staff with good motivations in some of the homeless shelters and everything, but you have no trust left. I have been through 17 homeless shelters in the city and been kicked out of all but two of them. One of them I am currently still living in. In between that, I was sleeping on the street in tents, like under the bridge at the bus station and, in between that, in institutions. You never shake off what it does to your trust, ability to build trust with people and ability to shake off how they see you. I think that even more disabling than your own attitude to yourself is these people's attitude to you. What does criminalisation do to people when they are trying to get a job? When I was sober between the ages of 24 and 28, I went through four different homeless organisations because I wanted to volunteer and give back. All of them Garda vetted and rejected me, except UISCE, and I still work for UISCE now. We are unique but we should not be.

Could I just bring Ms Malone in if that is okay? Just to build on the question, €98,000 a year is the cost to keep a person in prison and for that money we get retraumatisation, re-harm and recidivism.

I was surprised to learn just a few days ago that the Netherlands has closed 20 of its prisons in the last few years. Their crime rate has slowly reduced, particularly around petty crime. That is because they were one of the first countries in Europe to take a harm reduction policy with drugs. In the late 1980s and early 1990s they implemented a coherent, brought-together approach to harm reduction so that they had social services, the police and health services all working together. They had needle exchange. They were way ahead. They came under pressure from other countries in Europe to take a more hard-line approach. They have been implementing that for a long period. They divert people from petty crime, instead of being put in prison. A month is a long sentence for petty crime in the Netherlands. Instead of putting them in prison they divert them to addiction or drug treatment centres, if that is where they need to go, or to mental health, community service, or to remotes. We could easily do that kind of thing here. That is what we could be doing. The stories of Suzanne and Annmarie are so incredibly powerful and they just touched so much.

I am the mother of a drug user as well and the stories she tells me absolutely break my heart. I find it quite difficult to even cope or function sometimes, in knowing what is going on in her life. On the criminalisation of the drug user, Suzanne is perfectly right, it goes right through. It filters right through society, so that presenting at hospitals - she will not go to hospital unless I accompany her. She says, "they treat me differently when you are not there", and I have seen it happen. I am on our local drugs task force. I am sure it is a problem all throughout the country, where people in psychosis are brought to hospital and released within an hour because they have got crack or other drugs in their system. Where do they go? They end up back in their families. They end up back in the community and causing harm there. Prison, criminalisation is not the answer. It is doing nothing. It is just filling up our prisons. It is just traumatising people further. That "RTÉ Investigates" programme about severely mentally ill people being held in prison that was on a few weeks ago was shocking and distressing to watch.

There is a narrative out there now. We had it sometimes being expressed at the citizens' assembly that what we need to do is send people to prison, that is the best place for them. First of all, we should not need to send people to prison to in theory give them stuff that they can get in the community. Second, the majority of people who go to prison get worse because the services are not there while they are in there.

A lot of the time, this is circular. For example, the last suspended sentence I got was for firearms charges, for carrying a blade because I was sleeping rough in the Phoenix Park. My free legal aid pointed out that I had symptoms of post-traumatic stress, because I had been raped on the street and attacked by a guy that I used to work for selling sex to survive, and as a result I was scared and that I had to carry a blade just even in a practical sense but also because I was paranoid. You are further criminalised for being traumatised. It never ends. You are further traumatised in jail and so on. There is no way off.

Go raibh maith agaibh go léir. Apologies and I will not even go through that usual thing where politicians explain how busy they are in all the other places they are, that you are not interested in. I have no doubt the committee has already gone into this. I could hear what the Chair was on about. I think it was Mr. O'Hara who previously had stated that we already know what we need to do. We have seen what works as regards tackling addiction. Beyond that, if we were actually to resource the hell out of it in the short term, in the long term we would need less of the resources. That is the thing. We keep going around in circles. We do a bit, we fund a bit but we do not actually change anything systemically.

With the national drugs strategy, the big fear is that we have absolutely moved away from whatever element there was of community feed-in. That is a question I will put to the witnesses. The drugs task forces are rightfully up in arms. I get that drug-taking in Ireland has changed, particularly as regards cocaine use. The big thing that sticks in my head is when the GAA has motions going to congress in relation to cocaine use. That just tells us how prevalent it is throughout society. While we need an answer on the widespread use of drugs and the criminality that goes with it, we also need an answer in respect of the ongoing issues that always have been in those communities that have been let down in particular where we have not had the interest or the support. It is no big shock that it is people from a particular set of eircodes who end up in prison and where there is crossover between trauma, poverty, addiction and a whole pile of other things. Even when we have funded projects, it is never enough. I think I have mentioned here a couple of times that Archways appeared before the children's committee. It does everything from very early childhood and family supports through to the Greentown project and trying to remove people who have fallen into or been groomed into criminality. Its representatives said they are dealing with people three or four generations in and they have to accept a certain element of failure on that. That is not taking away from the work they are doing. It is just the reality. I have this particular issue that we are not taking this seriously and we never have. I would say that the witnesses are not shocked that the national drugs strategy does not have the community feed-in. I would say they are not shocked that it has moved away from the idea that we need to concentrate resources particularly in areas of deprivation.

Putting in the necessary supports could avoid some of this and catch people at an earlier stage. I am taken with a number of things that were said but it has been said to us many times before that we need support services that provide respect. It is about support rather than being told what to do, which is ineffective because you do not build up that relationship. As per normal, I spent too long talking.

In UISCE, we are clear our goal is for there to be no need for UISCE. If we were to implement a proper, robust approach to drug use, we would be looking at deconstructing a lot of the systems and services we have. It might take 30 years.

What would it look like?

It would look like having healthier communities. That is the first thing we need to do. We need to ask why huge numbers of people are taking drugs to cope with everyday reality. It is to do with inequality, exclusion and stigma. I will give members a quick story. We were working with two people-----

And lack of mental health services, as was said earlier, too.

Yes. We were working with two people a couple of years ago. They had identical drug use. Both had been abused as young people, had ended up on heroin from the age of about 12 or 13 and had lost their partners to a drug overdose. One was from Ballymun and the other was from a more affluent area on the southside. Their abuse and drug use was similar but their outcomes were vastly different. When the partner of the guy from a more affluent area died, Tusla never got involved because his parents were able to step in. They had the resources and the time. They took the kids. He never got criminalised because he never got arrested. He used to get money off his family and he always had somewhere to live. When he wanted to go to treatment, he was able to get into treatment quickly. He was in treatment twice and then the third time he got it. When he finally got drug free, his kids were still there, he had a place to live and his da got him a job. For the guy from Ballymun, his kids were taken into care early. He had been in cycles of imprisonment. He had never been able to get into treatment because he did not meet the criteria. The harm and the outcomes were vastly different.

We need to equalise the system. What the first guy had was great. I do not underestimate the level of stress and harm caused in that family but there was a robust process of social capital. The people who go into treatment and do well are people who have social capital. It is a medical thing. Some people take drugs; they like taking drugs and become addicted. Then they address it, go into treatment or get help in the community and come off it. Most of the successes are from that cohort. We need to equalise it. We are not ignoring the problem in that cohort. We recognise there is a problem over here and-----

It is concentrated and different in certain areas.

Yes. There is a growing fear of drugs and drug dependency in certain communities that do not have access to services. They need access. We need to not stigmatise those people. We can do both. If you look at why we had a citizens' assembly, I do not think it is because people are concerned about people smoking a bit of weed and taking a bit of cocaine in the house at the weekend, however morally right or wrong we think that is. We are looking at the social issues connected to drugs and they are connected to the 10% of people who are drug dependent, 90% of whom have experienced trauma. They are the ones in prisons or emergency accommodation. They are there because of failures in how we implement social policies. If we implement a robust social policy framework that has cross-departmental support, in ten, 15 or 20 years' time, we will have a healthy society.

There was never a heroin epidemic - for want of a better word - or a crack epidemic in any but the most marginalised communities. There is a reason for that.

As much as you get cocaine and benzos everywhere, you will not find heroin and crack cocaine in many affluent places.

You do not see it. People who experience the most trauma take the hardest drugs because they need them to get through the day. They are doing that because-----

They are trying to obliterate something.

Yes.

I cannot remember who said it but-----

If it is very clever, pretend I said it.

Ms Dunphy made a powerful point - because, of course, she is a mother - about parents being scared. I got a few months sober and then relapsed recently. The last time I scored heroin in this city, I caused a fight between two lads who were obviously under the age of 15. They were fighting to serve me so they would get the profit from selling me heroin. That should break any mam's heart. They are obviously groomed into this lifestyle. I cannot remember who used the word but it is a gendered thing. At that age, I was being groomed into prostitution. I was also a not-straight, queer kid who was questioning my sexuality. There is layer upon layer of marginalisation but people understood to be female will be groomed into selling sex while these kids are being groomed into wanting to be a gangster and wanting to be tough. It is a class issue and that is why it is being ignored.

We only see the drug dealer on the corner in certain areas. There can be very good police work done to put people out of action but we see it year after year. Somebody could have a house taken off them and occasionally will face serious charges but the kid on the street sees that person making money and has seen them making money all their lives. The kid does not see an awful lot of routes other than following them and that is what they do.

There was a great book written years ago by Kevin Lawlor, Áine De Róiste and Maurice Devin called Young People in Contemporary Ireland. One of their main discoveries was young people want three things: money, status and power. How you get that in Sheriff Street or in Dalkey is vastly different. As long as there is poverty, inequality and lack of opportunity - young people have a severe lack of opportunity and do not have the same outcomes - people will take what is in front of them.

Mr. O'Hara pretty much made my point on young people. Doubling down on what everyone has said, there has to be a broad approach to this. We cannot continue to just focus on drug use, arrest rates and seizure rates. When we talk about good police work taking people out of criminal networks, does that mean fewer people are using drugs and suffering harms or drug-related risks? Are young people not engaged in criminal networks or are they more engaged every day? This approach is not working. There has to be a look at the broader spectrum of what happens for young people to get engaged in drugs in whatever way that is - selling, use or distribution. We have to look at housing and employment. The broader approach needs to be informed by people who use drugs and young people who engage in these spaces. If we look at the whole-of-government approach that is recommended, we must ensure young people and people who use drugs are part of the discussions for reforming policies. There need to be policies that cut across all sectors and make sure people are protected and kept safe.

At the end of the day, we cannot avoid the need for decriminalisation. Ireland is so far behind in this regard and it is incredibly frustrating to see we are still debating whether to do this when it is so evidence based.

I thank Ms Lawlor. We have reached the end of the session. Would anybody like to make a last comment?

Going back to young people, the decriminalisation and health diversion approach is all well and good in big cities but in rural areas, most people have to travel miles for their methadone and everything else. I have seen already where a court case could be in Laois and someone is being sent to the far side of Kildare to go into this programme. How will that ever work with travel costs? Their families do not have the supports in place. I cannot see it working on that level for people in rural areas.

Earlier I referenced the communication failure around the voices of drug users into Government's ears. What I wrote to say at the end of that - but did not get to say it, so I am going to - is this: Government Members need to clean out their ears before one more person dies a victim of State bias, apathy, stigma, ignorance and pure laziness.

I was talking to a family member not long ago. I was out with a cousin of mine and she has a son who is getting involved in stuff and is from a certain area. My cousin's partner is in prison and her son has experienced a lot of trauma. The response of the State was the young person has to go to a Garda youth diversion project and she is being told to go to parenting classes. She said to me, "I know how to be a mother. I just have no money." She said his father is in prison, the school he is going to is not the greatest and he is getting involved in stuff.

The State's response is almost to view all these individuals as just problems and to decide that what we need to do is fix them by giving them skills to manage themselves. It is actually the opposite. We need to ask why there is an over-representation of that mother and that young person in those communities and what we have done to address it in the past 40 years.

From a family perspective, what happens when people are incarcerated? There is less income coming into the house. There is then less disposable income. These young people have no money. When the mother, father, brother or whoever is locked up, there is a huge deficit. The young people have nothing. They see it as an easy option and an easy way to make money. That is what happens. It just rolls on and we end up with drug debt intimidation. Family members are left to try to deal with that. In certain areas, you can go and get a loan. In other areas, there is just no hope of getting a loan and there is no way of paying off the debt. Families have ended up doing things, and having to do things, to pay off drug debts that they would never, ever consider, and that in certain other areas would never be considered as a means of paying off a debt. That is happening on a daily basis.

Would Ms Malone like to say anything?

The others have said everything. I feel overwhelmed listening to them. I have a contrary view. I understand the class analysis, but I think a lot of the harm in wealthier and more affluent neighbourhoods is just better hidden. My experience of our family support group, where we have a wide range of people from all different backgrounds, is that people of higher socioeconomic status are more inclined to distance themselves from their drug user. There is a lot of pressure there. When they do have drug-related debt, they can pay it, and they pay it quite easily. I know of people who were able to stump up very large sums of money for what really should have been just a tiny debt of a few hundred euro. I know of other people who have sold their homes and are now living in a shed in their daughter's back garden. If you owe €50,000 to a drug dealer and you are wealthy, you can manage it. If you owe €50,000 to a drug dealer and have to sell your home, that is everything gone. There is that imbalance.

I think that is a terrible tragedy and I do not mean to minimise it at all. I really respect that. It is terrible. Everything that person has worked so hard for is gone. I would like to say, as someone who has had to work off thousands in debt from a crystal meth addiction by doing sex work, that it is basically indentured servitude.

It is.

You cannot do anything about it. They know where you live. They come to the hostel to intimidate you. His girlfriend would come and threaten to stab me and everything. Absolutely awful though it is, if people have something other than their bodies to sell, it is a layer of privilege that protects them from working the streets to work off the debt. I am not disrespecting that at all.

It definitely is a layer of privilege, but we must also recognise that the harms-----

Absolutely, yes.

-----are also emotional and traumatic and social. I am not denying that the harms-----

I know.

The two can be true at the same time.

It transcends class, I know.

This is it. We have to remember that there are subtleties to this.

That is why FARI is really important. We deal with all the families across the board.

No matter the background, yes.

All over the country.

I thank the witnesses for bringing their expertise and lived experience, and bringing a lot to our work. I thank them for sharing their stories.