I wish to raise the increasing belief among local communities and politicians from all sides of the House that the Government is failing to tackle the drugs issue. The Minister has failed on this issue. There is also a belief that drug abuse is no longer a political priority. How does the Minister propose to deliver on the outstanding aspects of the national drugs strategy? The Government should have delivered on the drugs strategy by 2002. Some of the targets are already two years out of date.
The crisis in confidence is clear. The Government produced a national drugs strategy in 2001 to cover the period up to 2008. A crucial number of elements of that strategy should have been delivered in 2001-02, the first year of this grand strategy, but remain undelivered. One element was that additional resources would be given to the drugs teams in the Garda to tackle the drug dealers at a local level. I give credit to the Garda which has had successes and which continues, despite a lack of resources, to target local drug dealers. That element has not been met.
Action 7 mentioned in the strategy specifically promised an increase in community policing resources in local drugs task force areas by the end of 2001. I sit on the Rialto policing forum. We had to have a meeting with the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform to try to extract from him some money to pay for the administration of it, otherwise it would have collapsed as people were refusing to do any more work. Actions 48 and 51 promised that there would be a comprehensive and locally-accessible range of treatments and rehabilitation options by the end of 2002. That has not been delivered. Action 55 explicitly promised greater provision of alternative medical treatment. Again, the health boards have not moved on that.
Astoundingly, no funding commitments have been made to the drugs task forces in the past two year, basically since this Government was re-elected in 2002. This has paralysed drugs task forces. I sit on one, so I know exactly what I am talking about. The Ballyfermot drugs task force is struggling to deal with the huge range of issues which raise their ugly heads and with which we must deal to try to tackle the increasing drugs problem in the area.
The regional drugs task forces outside Dublin have not received any money, which is a scandal. If one looks at the total funding for drugs task forces, it is the equivalent to that given to the horse and greyhound racing fund, €63 million. It is nothing. It means this issue is not a priority and that horses and greyhounds are a bigger priority than tackling the drugs issue.
If the Minister and the Government were serious, they would recognise the growing crisis in regard to cocaine use in Dublin. The drugs task forces are trying their best to tackle this issue but they are waiting on a mandate to develop and provide specific, appropriate and effective programmes to try to help cocaine users and to tackle the problem. This issue demands immediate action and requires resources. If we do nothing, we will have learned nothing from the heroin epidemic and from our failure 20 years ago when people warned that heroin would take hold in this city. We need to ensure projects are funded now and not in ten years. Those who are willing to work in this field must get the training required to tackle cocaine use in Dublin. The only conclusion I can draw is that the Government has exploited the media hype surrounding the drugs crisis. It produced a report and a strategy and promised much, but it has done nothing. It has put the strategy on a shelf.
A group with which I am familiar and which does great work is ARC, Addiction Response Crumlin. It has the same budget now as it had in 2000, four years ago. It is down three workers and is deprived of the services these workers provided. That is a scandal resulting from the fact the Government has not provided additional funding. It has also allowed the health boards to cut the funding to mainstream groups. It is about time the Minister and this Government wised up, got real and understood there is a crisis. Unless they start to tackle it, we will be in the situation we were in in the early 1980s.
