The Government is no longer responding to the drugs crisis with the priority it needs, a resigning member of the National Drugs Strategy Team has claimed.
Fergus McCabe, the sole community representative on a Government committee set up to co-ordinate local and regional drugs task forces, has resigned over "serious concerns" about the direction of the National Drugs Strategy.
Addressing a press conference attended by almost 200 community activists, politicians and supporters in Dublin this afternoon, Mr McCabe said that bureaucratic wrangling and a lack of funding were seriously hindering efforts to tackle the "drugs crisis" in many communities.
"I hope that the Government will look at the amount of funding it's putting into local and regional drugs task forces and will realise that the sums that are there at the moment are just not sufficient to adequately deal with the problems that are out there," he told ireland.com.
"We moved from having a drugs strategy that was characterised by lack of policy, structures and support in communities to one that, despite its faults, was welcomed across the board. We moved from a position where 95 per cent of local drugs task forces were funded to only allocating €1 million to support the Emerging Needs Fund, which was designed to run alongside task force projects."
Attending the meeting, Labour leader Pat Rabbite, who set up the local task forces as Minister of State with responsibility for drugs strategy in 1996, said that the cornerstone of drug policy presumed the involvement of local communities.
"There's an effort to minimise and diminish, for whatever reason, the involvement of local communities in the process and that will be disastrous," he said.
"I'm sad that it's come to this and I hope we can make Fergus McCabe's resignation a cause of change in Government policy."
Speaking on RTE Radio, however, Noel Ahern, Minster of State with responsibility for drug policy, expressed satisfaction that the strategy was working well.
"There's always more you can do, there's always new issues, there's always new challenges and we are working on those but we should not underestimate the fact that there are now 600 people working out there on the prevention side and the treatment side," he said.