Is there A Drug Problem in Cork? That was a question posed at a meeting held in the Metropole Hotel in Cork city back in 1983. It was a meeting of the Cork Speakers Club which was a kind of forerunner of the Joint Policing Committee (JPC) meetings we’ve become familiar with in recent times.
The Cork Examiner reported on that meeting, and it seems all the movers and shakers in the city were there along with a panel of speakers with only one question to answer. Does Cork have a drugs problem? While the answer was yes, the seriousness of the problem was a matter of divergence and overall, the general impression was that alcoholism was a far more serious issue.
As far as the garda representative at the meeting was concerned, there was a growing drug abuse problem in Ireland, especially in Dublin, and while the problem could not be classed as alarming and was not out of hand, he agreed it did appear to be growing.
The Medical Council Research Board, an independent body, had found that the drug problem in Galway, Dublin and Cork was minimal while the Southern Health Board had found it “minimal and containable.”
Professor R. J. Daly, Dept. of Psychiatry, U.C.C., and Clinical Director, Southern Health Board, said Cork had a problem with the national panic about drugs and with the gross misinformation concerning the levels of illegal drug abuse and appropriate responses on the part of the community and health services. He questioned the sources of this information on the levels of drug addiction describing it as hot gossip.
It’s easy to be critical in hindsight but there was a limited understanding of the seriousness of the growing drugs problem back then. You could argue that what was happening in other jurisdictions abroad, and in our own capital city, should have created more awareness, but there was one man at that meeting who was more informed than the others.
The then Lord Mayor of Cork, Mr. John Dennehy, disagreed with previous speakers and suggested they were facing a very serious problem. He pointed out that at least six people had already died from drugs in the Cork area.
He was right to be concerned because we were heading into an epidemic. Dublin was awash with drugs and that scourge wasn’t going to remain within the Pale.
When I went to Dublin in 1980 as a young member of An Garda Siochana, I was immediately struck by the extent of the illicit drug problem in the capital. The Dunne family were the main criminal gang at that time, and they controlled the heroin market. The stuff was everywhere.
Heroin was destroying communities to such an extent that President Hillery vowed to make the dangers of drug abuse the main focus of his second term of office when he was sworn in in 1983. He said his background as a medical doctor made him acutely conscious of the problems of drug abuse and he intended to concentrate on that issue.
He planned to invite the various interest groups involved in fighting the problem of drug abuse to a meeting in order to forge closer links between the different bodies. He wanted doctors, the gardai and social workers to meet him in Aras an Uachtarain to work out a strategy which would give them a common bond in combating the drugs problem in this country.
I don’t know if that materialised or not, but it did show that he was progressive in his thinking. He obviously had an awareness that the drug situation was escalating and presented a serious risk to communities everywhere.
Fast forward forty years to 2023 and we are still dealing with the issue. As reported in The Echo, Chief Superintendent Tom Myers, speaking at a meeting of the Cork City Joint Policing Committee addressed concerns regarding the visibility of drugs in the city centre.
He acknowledged that drug dealing in Cork City continues to represent a “big challenge” to gardaí, and vowed to continue to target the individuals who are “destroying our communities”. He accepted that drugs are in every corner of the city now.
Fianna Fáil councillor Colm Kelleher said he witnessed open drug taking in the city centre on a Sunday afternoon on Patrick Street. He has been steadfast in his support of a supervised injection centre (SIF) for Cork City and said his faith in the idea was further solidified following a recent visit to a city in New York.
Mr. Kelleher discovered a supervised injection facility in Rochester in Upstate New York, and since it was delivered, they’ve seen an 84%-85% reduction in open drug use within their city.
Cork City Council chief executive Ann Doherty suggested that a meeting could be sought with the Minister of State at the Department of Health, Hildegarde Naughton, with a view to progressing the matter.
Back in 2011, through my involvement in community policing, I started a conversation around introducing a supervised injecting facility to Cork city. I gathered the main stakeholders together and we had a series of meetings. Progress was slow because the topic was controversial. There were many potential pitfalls from a policing, political and health perspective but we drove ahead. In 2013, I went overseas with the United Nations and as far as I am aware, those meetings petered out.
There is no magic wand solution to the drug problem, but we can mitigate the effects with supervised injecting facilities. A SIF is a clean, safe, healthcare environment where people can inject drugs under the supervision of trained health professionals which will help to reduce HIV infection rates, overdose deaths, and drug-related prison convictions. They have been successful elsewhere.
Maybe it’s time to stop talking and move on to action.