A COMMUNITY leader in the Dublin estate of Killinarden has claimed that a nine-year-old boy in the area is injecting heroin.
Mr Cecil Johnson said he could not believe it when he learned that the youngster was "mainlining" the drug. "I was devastated. It is shocking. He is only a baby ... Innocence for children facing the drug plague is gone. If something is not done we are facing disaster."
Mr Johnson, who has been in the forefront of vigil protests and efforts to rid the 1,642-house Killinarden estate of drug dealing, said the involvement of a child of this age showed the contempt drug dealers had for the people.
He was also interviewed on the RTE Liveline radio programme yesterday.
"Someone had to show, or instruct, that poor child how to inject. It shows the contempt dealers have for children and their own local communities by providing and selling drugs to such a child", Mr Johnson said.
"We had come across 12 and 13-year-old kids with drug problems before, but never anyone as young as this. Tallaght has the largest population of people under 14 in the country. I think there are 34,000 children here under that age.
"I don't know how the child is coping, or his parents. The family want to keep it as private as possible. Naturally enough, it is my belief that the family are not coping properly and I am not sure there is any healthcare involvement at the moment."
He said they had first learned of the child's drug problem 10 days ago when a dealer - who was leaving the area due to the protests - had told them about the boy. He had since confirmed the facts.
"Our concern is that maybe some of his other little friends he plays with could be involved ... A child of this age is not capable of injecting himself properly and at some stage he is going to make an error.
He called for greater efforts to provide treatment facilities and deal with the problem. "If it is not addressed or contained at its present level, we will see younger kids over the next three to four years. We will have a society of zombies."
He said they had found 200 confirmed addicts on the estate, an average of one addict in every eight houses. "Those sort of figures represent a plague and we are all fearful of it developing further."
The Eastern Health Board area, in which Killinarden was located, had a population of 146,000 and up until May had only one drug addiction counsellor, he added.
"There is no provision for treatment. If an addict wants to access treatment, they would have to acquire a false address in one of the other health board areas in the city to try to get on to a treatment programme.
"We have set up our own community-based and run programme. We do need the back-up of all the services and the proper resourcing of them", Mr Johnson said.