Interview with Minister Aodhán Ó Ríordáin

What a difference a year and the choice of Minister makes. When Hot Press requested face to face time with Junior Health Minister Alex White to discuss the findings of the Global Drug Survey 2014 – the first to include Ireland in its pharmaceutical fact-finding mission – he declined and instead asked us to submit a list of written questions, which we did.
What we got in return was a largely generic reiteration of government drug policy, which reeked of civil servant ‘safety first’ involvement and spectacularly failed to address most of the points Hot Press wanted to tease out with Mr. White.
This year we decided to approach the new Minister of State at the Department of Justice and Equality and Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht with special responsibility for Equality, New Communities, Culture and Drugs Strategy - has there ever been a longer political job title? - Aodhán Ó Ríordáin who, given his views on the need to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution pertaining to abortion and his advocacy of gay rights, we suspected would be more willing to engage with us than his Department of Health predecessor.
We suspected right. Within two hours of putting in our request, Minister Ó Ríordáin’s parliamentary advisor was on the phone saying his boss would be delighted to talk to us with no pre-conditions or need to specify in advance the areas that would be discussed - an increasing rarity when dealing with members of government.
Our meeting takes place in his private Dáil office which, you’ll be pleased to hear, hasn’t had too many of your tax euro lavished on it. The aforementioned parliamentary advisor asks whether the Minister would like to record our conversation, to which he replies, “It’s Hot Press, I trust them.”
Before getting down to drugs business, there are a few other matters to discuss with the 39-year-old, who before becoming the Labour TD for Dublin North Central was a city councillor and Sheriff Street school principle. In 2006, he launched the Right To Read Campaign and has a long track record in social advocacy and protection.
Hot Press: Your current Twitter header includes you, your parliamentary advisor, Labour Party leader Joan Burton and Miss Panti celebrating victory in the Marriage Referendum, which you described as the most important vote of your life. For a lot of people, the 1916 commemorations would’ve been very mute if it had been a ‘No’.
Aodhán Ó Ríordáin: I actually said at a meeting the previous week, “I almost feel we should cancel the commemorations if we get a ‘no’ vote.” They overlap for me, because the commemorations are an awful lot about where our country is going and what our value systems are. You couldn’t go from a meeting about commemorating the 1916 Uprising into another about marriage equality and not see a link between the two. It’s the same for all rights – LGBT, gender, traveller, disability. I’m very fortunate that my area of responsibility is something I’ve been working on for a long time. I know a lot of the areas already.
Being part of the ‘Yes’ campaign empowered a lot of people who are asking “what next?” in terms of modernising the country. You’ve expressed pro-choice sympathies in the past, so is abortion the next battle?
My position is clear; the Eighth Amendment has to go and my own personal opinion would be to have it replaced with legislation that would allow for terminations in cases that would include risk to the life or health of the mother – and when I say health that would also include mental health. The Savita Halappanavar case touched the minds and hearts of a lot of people, but that case could happen again tomorrow. There are situations like that happening all the time in Ireland where doctors or medical people don’t think they can intervene until a woman’s life is at risk. They know their life will be at risk eventually, but they have to wait until a certain situation arises. So we cannot deal with fatal foetal abnormality and cases of rape or incest until the Eighth Amendment goes. If we had a referendum on the Eighth Amendment, I'm sure a lot of people will come out of the woodwork and say, “Well, actually, my daughter or mother or sister had to go for a termination and I refuse to have her labelled as a criminal.” Those stories are very much taboo, but there’s 4,000 women a year making that trip.”
Isn’t the whole point that none of those 4,000, in many cases very vulnerable, women should be having to cross the Irish Sea?
Abortion is always a tragedy, so what you want is to create a society where there isn’t a need for termination in certain circumstances. Where we don’t have a society where rape is such a massive problem. The Marriage Equality Bill was a 10-year campaign. If we have a debate on the Eighth Amendment, that would be a four or five-year campaign, I imagine, to win the hearts and minds of people. We do get criticised by those who feel very strongly about removing the Eighth Amendment and want a referendum in the morning, but if we had a referendum in the morning it would get beaten so badly that we couldn’t return to it for another 20-years. My fairly strategic, pragmatic view is you have a referendum when you're convinced you can win it. The Eighth Amendment is the blocker, but people won’t remove it unless they have cast-iron guarantees as to what’s going to replace it. Otherwise, it'd be a very easy win for the 'No' side.
With Ireland becoming more and more multi-cultural, doesn’t the Catholic Church’s still dominant role in education need to be looked at?
Well, yes, I believe so. I’m currently working on a thing called Section 37 of the Employment Equality Act to address the LGBT teachers or divorcees or unmarried mothers working in Catholic schools who feel they can’t be open about their situation because it might impinge on their employment and promotion prospects. I think the various churches realise the situation we have at the moment is unsustainable. Religion is not a good enough reason in my view for separating people. And it’s very expensive by the way. We’ve 4,000 schools in a country, with the size of population of Manchester. Why are we doing that? I don’t believe either that we should separate girls and boys in schools; it leads to gender stereotypes and restricted subject choice and gender inequality in society. But I may be a minority view on that. If you come from a position of what's best for the child, as opposed to picking an ideological row for the sake of it, you've a better chance of winning people over.
One of the first things you said, taking on the governmental drugs brief, is that your approach would be health-based. Can you expand on that?
If somebody has an addiction I don’t think dealing with that person through the criminal justice system is doing anybody any favours. It’s a medical issue, it's a medical need. If you look at the bare facts, 70% of those who have been convicted of drug offences are people who have been caught in possession of drugs for their own personal use. What a complete waste of Garda time! What a complete waste of court time! Why are we doing that? If you see somebody shooting up down an alleyway, do you really see them as a criminal or somebody who’s in chronic need of medical care? I think most people would make the logical determination that this person is in need of medical care. This person does not need intervention from a gard or the court system.
You said in relation to the abortion amendment that political battles need to be winnable. I’m not sure the electorate or, indeed, your Dáil colleagues are ready for the decriminalisation of hard drugs like heroin but they might accept that people having criminal records for cannabis is a nonsense.
Is (having a criminal record for cannabis) going to help that person? If your position is, "Drugs are bad, everyone should stop using them", then you’re not coming from a very realistic position. Do you feel that a person’s use of a substance should be a criminal offence that dogs them for the rest of their life? Instinctively no. Somebody will come into a meeting and give me the reasons why the current situation persists. I am an advocate for a discussion around the decriminalisation of drugs. When people hear decriminalisation they think legalisation, but they are two very, very different things.
Have you studied the Coloradan model, where all types of marijuana are legal, regulated and taxed with over $50 million going into the state’s public school system last year as a result?
No, but the Justice Committee of the Oireachtas are heading off to Portugal soon to see the results of what they did ten years ago.
Which was a wholesale liberalisation of Portugeuse drug laws. They’re therapy-based rather than punitive, with people who break them being brought in front of a commission comprising of a social worker, a psychiatrist and a lawyer. As a result, drug abuse there has been significantly reduced.
Yes, it’s seeing the drug abuser as a person, dealing with the realities of this person’s habits and finding a more realistic approach to dealing with it. It doesn’t mean that you send somebody merrily on their way, but it does mean that you’re not dealing with somebody through the criminal justice system, which to me makes an awful lot more sense. There’s maybe a comfort zone in Middle Ireland which says, “This is just bad and the people who do this are bad; just keep it away from me and where I am and everything will be fine.” I don’t think that’s realistic. For far too long we have said, “This is a problem in certain parts of the country and particularly Dublin. If they sorted themselves out we’d be fine.” That is a lie. If a country has collectively produced a drug problem like we have, then everybody is at fault for it. Everybody is responsible for it, and not just the areas that are most visibly involved in it.
Last year in the Global Drug Survey, 83% of those found in possession of small amounts of cannabis say that they were let off without a caution. The suggestion being that there’s some sort of unofficial decriminalisation. Would you expect a member of An Garda Síochána to take someone with €20 of cannabis on them through the court system?
There isn’t informal decriminalisation of cannabis. A guard will do what a guard will do. We had a big discussion last year about Garda discretion and what they'll do in certain circumstances with regards to traffic violations, and we came down very heavily that a Garda shouldn’t use his/her own discretion. I would assume that the same situation applies to cannabis. There may be certain situations when a Garda reads a particular circumstance in a particular way; understands who the individual is; and makes their own determination in that way. I understand where respondents to your poll are coming from, but there isn’t informal discussion with regards to the decriminalisation of cannabis. I’ve made a few personal statements about the drug situation in Ireland and I have had off the record conversations with the Gardaí who say that the current situation can’t continue, that it’s a complete waste of time and that we’re not dealing with the issue in any real way, and that some of the things I've suggested around decriminalisation or consumption rooms could help in certain aspects.
In the UK, Chief Constables are able to say, “The reality for me and my officers is that the drug laws aren’t working, they need to be changed.” In Ireland, senior Gardaí aren’t allowed to express an opinion, which doesn’t contribute to the open, honest discussion about drugs you say we need to have.
The responsibility of a guard is to keep the peace and enforce the law. It's their job not to have an opinion on it. But I think it’s beneficial when you have somebody from the guards at a senior level who says, “Look, this is what we are doing; if this was to change in this legal way or that legal way, then it would free up an awful lot more of our time.” There are some people who’d say, “If you decriminalised cannabis, for example, some of the big drug Lords who’ve been taken down on much lesser charges - you know, the Al Capone scenario - mightn’t get nailed.” That’s a point of view. Should we listen to guards or public health nurses or teachers who are dealing with this situation every single day? Yes, absolutely. Yesterday I was out in Crumlin – there’s a drug task force there and the most telling contributions were from four service users. They’ve been through it, they know what they’re talking about.
Returning to the Colorado model, the fact that $50 million a year is going into the public school system rather than those big drug Lords’ pockets is a very compelling reason to legalise cannabis outright here.
I don’t think we’re anywhere near talking about the legalisation of anything. We’re back to the discussion of decriminalisation and how you deal with someone who has a drugs issue. I think Ireland has come to a realisation that people use drugs, that people are always going to use drugs. The ‘Just Say No’ message will frighten some young people, but they are the people who are probably never going to get involved in drugs in the first place. The argument that if you legalise and tax it... some other clinicians and medical people will say, “We have a legal drug called alcohol and we can’t control that. Young people are out of control, old people are out of control, middle-aged people are out of control. We’ve had an out of control love affair with this substance for hundreds of years and we're passing it down to our children all the time. And we’ve completely failed to tackle it. So, on top of that, you want to legalise some other substances?” One of the biggest challenges we have right now is poly-drug use, the complicated way that people are taking drugs. What young people are taking now is completely different to what they were taking 20-years ago. The people who are on methadone now are a generation that are much older, and many will feel that the treatment given them worked for some but didn’t work for everybody. We are the only country in Europe, I think, that has only one treatment plan when it comes to those who have a heroin problem and we’re trying to change that with the introduction of suboxone. Do we start talking about legalisation before we even start talking about decriminalisation? I don’t think so.
How do you sell decriminalisation to the people who really matter - the electorate and listeners to Joe Duffy because, let’s face it, they’re the ones who dictate policy, not medical experts.
You have to treat people with respect. It’s like, “Why is the RTÉ soccer panel so successful?” Because they treat the average member of the public as a thinking sports fan who wants to know more about the game, and doesn’t really enjoy cliches. If you say to the public, “This is what we’re actually talking about” rather than dealing in soundbites, they’ll appreciate that. In my view the problem in politics is that we all deal in soundbites.
The debate here really isn’t nuanced, is it?
No, it’s not. I say “decriminalisation” and somebody else says, “That fella just wants to legalise it, well, ugh, what about our children?” And then it comes to a soundbite. If you try to have a drug treatment centre or programme in a community, the community can sometimes be okay with that - but very often not be okay with that. I know this because I’m a constituency politician; a rumour starts up that such and such an HSE facility is going to be a methadone centre, and your office is flooded with phone calls. Do we collectively think that the drug problem is all of our problem or do we choose to forget?
The addiction specialist Hot Press often consults on heroin-related matters, Dr. Garett McGovern, describes as “off the Richter Scale” the ten new cases of HIV among opiate-users in Dublin. What’s going on?
Well, this is where I come back to the conversation about consumption rooms. Not everybody is in favour of it - and have very good reasons not to be in favour of it. They know this problem very well, but we can’t stand over a situation where people are down alleyways or behind shops or in stairwells of flat complexes or in parks and playgrounds leaving the paraphernalia behind them in a very vulnerable situation. A consumption room allows a very small cohort of people who are not anywhere near a mainstream drug treatment programme (to inject safely). In Dublin city, you’re probably talking about less than a hundred.
What political and/or legal process needs to be gone through to enable their introduction?
You’d have a legal change as part of the Misuse of Drugs Bill or Amendment to the Drugs Act that’s coming towards the Oireachtas at the moment. I’ve raised it. What you’d have to do first is get rid of the legal issue blockage, and then you discuss how will this be managed, who will manage it, where would it be managed, what protocols would we put in place. They did it in Sydney, and there was an awful lot of concern, but the centre there has been quite successful.
Do you think Irish consumption rooms are achievable in this government's lifetime?
(Pauses and then laughs) It depends on how long that is!
For the sake of this debate, let’s say it goes full-term.
Sorting out the legalistic blockage to it is possible. I don’t think the establishment of one is possible though, not in that short term. You’ve to bring an awful lot of people on board and convince them. The conversation is only starting. We have to listen to service users, listen to the people who know what they’re talking about. The Ana Liffey Project are very much in favour of it, Merchants Quay are as well. CityWide have their opinions on it too. There’s a general view that this is something worth trying. But what if something happens on site that we haven't foreseen? Then again, people used to say that about needle exchange. They said, "You're facilitating it."
At the end of the day, it’s about trying to keep vulnerable members of society safe.
Yeah, it’s harm reduction where you have clean needles so you’re reducing the potential for HIV
or Hep C. This is what we’re trying to do with the consumption rooms. I believe they can work. I believe it’s a compassionate response to citizens of this Republic who have a medical need. I think too many people view them as human litter, the thinking being that if they weren’t there that we’d feel better. That if somebody just moved them on, we wouldn’t have to see them anymore. But what’s happening now is that they’re injecting and all the paraphernalia they’re leaving behind them is not safe. They would benefit from such a facility as the start of a treatment programme to get them somewhere. Five-years ago the idea of consumption rooms and decriminalisation was crazy – but maybe in five-years time we’ll have a different discussion on it.
I think it's fair to say that if somebody wants to buy heroin, they can get it. We're spending millions on trying to keep it out, yet it's here in huge quantities. Doesn't that make a nonsense of prohibition?
Well, find me a country that’s legalised heroin and we can see how that worked out.
Again, you’re having to deal with political realities.
No, I’m dealing with the reality of what I feel would be best for the common good.
But you have to be wise enough to know what's achievable.
Yeah.
Dr. Garrett McGovern says the number of people on methadone programmes being static at around 10,000 represents a failure to adequately deal with the heroin problem here. Even an increase of 1,000 or 2,000 year-on-year would indicate that we’re going in the right direction. Where do you stand on methadone maintenance?
Well, you go to one group and they'll say, “A doctor would never put his son or daughter on methadone because it’s putting people in cold storage.” Yet the assumption that methadone is a failure for everybody doesn't stack up either. The assumption that suboxone is an awful lot better again doesn't necessarily stack up. Suboxone people can live very functional lives and hold down a job, but there are people on methadone who can do that as well. People can be, what, 28 years on methadone, maybe longer. It feels like cold storage, it feels like that’s the end of the discussion. There are two big gaps which are really key; the first being the one between the point of realisation that you have an addiction problem and seek medical help, and when treatment starts. You have to be using at a certain level, and if you're over that level (you're not eligible).
My understanding is that there are parts of the country where you have to wait between a year and eighteen months for a treatment programme, which simply isn’t acceptable.
Somebody makes the determination that they have a problem and that it has to stop - a huge moment in their lives - yet we say to them, “Glad you made that realisation, but you're not ready for our treatment programme yet.” No, I don’t think we can stand over that gap because it’s dangerous. People kill themselves in that gap. The second gap is in receiving after-care, the coming down off methadone. How do you get from the functionality that methadone brings to a different kind of functionality? If you come down off methadone you’ve to face an awful lot of realities, which drugs or drug treatment kept you away from.
So to clarify; waiting times should be weeks rather than months or years.
It should be weeks, but no individual treatment is ever going to work by itself. There has to be a whole envelope of care. Methadone is not good enough by itself, there has to be counselling and education.
Again to clarify; the number of people on methadone programmes being static is not indicative of a failure to treat enough people?
Maybe somebody else would say it shows that heroin isn’t the problem it was, and other things are the problem now. I believe young people aren’t taking it up in the same numbers that they used to, but other substances are a problem with teenagers. Benzos and different types of prescription drugs being among them.
At 7.9% and 11.9% respectively, the number of Global Drug Survey respondents taking benzos and mystery white powders seems astonishingly high.
And the challenge for people like me is how does policy keep up with a constantly changing problem? The National Drugs Strategy has been from 2009-2016, a seven-year programme. Do we need a tighter five-year one so that we can adequately deal with things? We've gone from the assumption that drugs is a working-class Dublin problem to a realisation that drugs are everywhere. People are taking them at all income levels, but middle-class Ireland has mechanisms for hiding it. They throw money at it, and somebody can go away for a while and come back and pretend they were studying or working abroad. Everybody has a problem with it and everybody has to be part of the solution.